Kelly TP-4

On Wednesday I met for the first time with Jesus from Venezuela during lunch hour. Jesus comes from a family of professionals (Doctor parents, engineering brothers) and Jesus himself is an attorney in Venezuela. He began his English studies at a school in Connecticut, and decided to continue at CIES, which he found to be much more friendly and helpful in his continuing English language education.
Jesus lives with a family in Monticello who own a farm. They grow all sorts of local produce there (squash, blueberries, greens, etc) and also have horses. I asked Jesus if he rode, which he does, and he told me about a sport in Venezuela, "coleo," that he used to do. This sport is sort of twist on bullfighting in the Spanish style. The person on horseback goes into the ring, with the object being to grab the bulls tail, wrap it around your hand, and dropping the bull to the ground. I was amazed at the sportsmanship required for this. Jesus told me he went into the ring about 4 times before deciding it was too dangerous. (He's got a great job, family and girlfriend after all!).

I asked him what he had been working on for school, and he showed me a worksheet on things that one would have "done on their trip to Orlando." I noticed that he got the ideas down perfectly, but has some trouble with articles. He also showed me the errors he made for a speech on whether or alcohol should be legal/illegal. I also saw article confusion, and just some translation errors from Spanish to English. We went over all these and I tried to have Jesus correct himself before telling him the correct way for doing things.
He told me they had recorded brief "conversations" of a phone call home telling someone what they are doing in Tallahassee. He thought he did poorly on it, and I asked him to tell me the things he's been up to.
Jesus is doing very well with his English. His goal is to be able to write and speak professionally with English at his law firm in Venezuela. He just has some minor problems with articles and translating things from Spanish to English too directly. The next time we meet I would like to work on articles with him, and also practice my own article problems in Spanish!