Today was my last meeting with Sulaiman. We met at CIES and started a conversation about classes. I had a lot of finals coming up, so I was telling Sulaiman about them, trying to turn the stressful situation into something a little funnier. Sulaiman, on the other hand, had just started a new session and was getting used to the change. I remember asking him if he was in a new session and he thought I was asking if he were a new student. We were able to clarify the confusion and laugh about it. He mentioned that his first day was really hard and overwhelming, but he is starting to get used to it. We also talked about the music we were listening to and movies we were watching. We had a discussion about jazz, classical and Spanish language music. The most interesting part of the conversation was when we started talking about religion. Something I have noticed since starting tutoring and conversation partners is that Christianity has a huge influence on United States culture, even for people who are not religious- I have found myself talking about Christianity quite a lot and I am not very religious. I had talked to Sulaiman about Christianity, so now we talked about Islam. We talked about the difference between Sunni and Shi’i Islam and similarities in the religions’ histories. We finished the conversation and said goodbye for the last time.
My next tutoring session was with Turki. We met at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street, the usual spot, and started the session with a causal conversation about life and his short term English goals. Turki decided he didn't want to continue with the second session of CIES classes, and that he wanted to rather focus solely on passing the IELTS exam. He said he found the CIES classes to be helpful, but also distracting. He said he thinks he's gotten the most out of his classes and that it would be more productive for him to study on his own. Where I don't completely agree with his logic, it is his life and I trust his decision making. For this session he brought his own material that he wanted to focus on. This time it was a reading passage that I even found to be quite difficult, and I was once again impressed by his far reach in practice and ability. The reading passage was accompanied by a set of numerous comprehension questions that we reviewed and answered together. The qu...
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