Dhugal Gardner TP2

 Last night I met up with my tutoring partner Hamad at Starbucks. I had planned to go over prepositions with him, but at his request we switched to tenses. He told me he has had trouble expressing the past tense, so that is what we started to go over. We started with the simple past (i.e. Yesterday I cleaned the car), and this was easily mastered, likewise the past progressive (i.e. I was cleaning the car). Things got a little trickier when we moved on to the present perfect, which, despite its name, does deal with the past. This is expressed using ‘have’ and the past participle (-ed, -en, or irregular), for example: I have eaten at that restaurant. It reflects a past action that could happen again; I ate at that restaurant in the past and I very well may eat there again. This took some explaining but he understood it well. He needed some clarification on the concept of ‘used to’.  I told him this concept reflects the exact same meaning as using the simple past, which is confusing when you put it like that, put in sentences it makes sense: In America, I (played/used to play) soccer and football. Hamad then asked me about the conditional (he didn’t know it by its name), and we went over conditional sentences expressed in the past, future and the general hypothetical:

         -If I had driven a car in 5^th grade, I would have been in many crashes.

         -If I were 6 feet 7 inches, I would be a basketball player.

         -If I earn $100 next week, I will buy a bike. 

The middle sentence a general hypothetical, it is not determined by any time frame, whereas the other two are. To practice these, we played a game I’m sure everyone has played in the car on a long road trip, where you ask each other what would you do in a hypothetical situation, and we used all 3 tenses.

Hamad dictated what we reviewed this session, I may stick to my own plan next time.