Lucy TP-2

Ah, Yuki. Tutoring partner number two. So, Yuki and I had our first session on Wednesday, May 23rd.  Between babysitting my nephew, and covering an intensive story on bats which required me to camp out with scientists in the woods of Wakulla that night, I was only able to meet with Yuki for exactly one hour, but wow, has he got personality. Right off the bat (pun intended) Yuki gives me a chocolate chip cookie. We are instant friends. The cookie is good. We're probably friends for life. I, in return, give him some fruit gummies I have in my purse. At this point, we’re soulmates. No, I kid. Actually, Yuki just kept saying how frustrated he was with English, and with himself and his pronunciation. Chill out, Yuk!

So, evidently Yuki is categorized as Group 1, but he loves to talk and is very expressive, so I can see him moving up in the levels quickly. I tried to tell him how impressed I was. If Yuki needed to get a cab across town, order a meatball sub, buy industrial strength electric tape, see a man about a horse, and get back to campus by bus paying only in nickels, he would make it work. It might take all day, but Yuki is capable. Unfortunately, he is also frustrated. Very frustrated. What doesn’t help, what I had never even considered as an issue for these students (!) is that they might have, as Yuki has, a speech impediment. He lisps. And boy does he talk quickly, on top of things.
So Yuki is from Osaka, Japan and will be returning in a couple months, though he really likes the U.S. He wants to get a degree in Sports Marketing. In Japan, he studied English, but wasn’t really interested in it, and scraped by, grade-wise. Now, he’s interested and motivated. But frustrated.
Yuki mostly wants to work on vocabulary and improve his listening skills. With vocabulary I pulled straight from Snow, we did a little work with synonyms and antonyms. I was super impressed to see that Yuki is already keeping a vocabulary notebook, but was disappointed to find that he doesn’t really review the words, and often doesn’t even define them in his notebook, just writes them down.  We ran through a few together with a focus on opposites…words like “sunrise” are easy, with “sunset” as the opposite. But words like “dull” can mean so very much. Say, shiny v. dull, the knife was ‘sharp’ v. ‘dull’, the meeting was dull, this person’s mind is ‘dull’. Whew.  And what about ‘solid’? Antonyms: Hollow, soft, weak, unreliable, and  how about ‘patchy’, as in this print is a solid, that one has polka dots. Dang.
We also did a  lesson on the word such, and the term “such as” by looking out the window of the CIES lounge and identifying different trees and park benches. “There are many trees outside, ‘such as’ that palm tree.”  I was proud to think of using our surroundings for the lesson…and I think he got it. Also, looking at ‘such’ as an amount meaning so much, smuch, such…or so many, really. “We have such sweet tooths, Yuki.” …I didn’t use that as an example…Can you imagine having to explain “tooths”… Why not teeth? Sweet teeth? And we are sharing teeth now? What the…?

I also brought along a childrens book to read with Yuki, courtesy of my one year old nephew who prefers chewing books to reading them right now, anyway. This one, “On the Night You Were Born” I chose mainly because I was afraid my sister would be mad if I took my first choice, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” (a primo read) out of her home. Anyway, it didn’t go over too well. I tried reading a bit and seeing if we could practice listening by having him recap what I had said, but I think he just thought it was really weird and maybe more than a tad condescending. And nonsensical. … “Night wind whispers?” “Moons smile, stars peek”? I don’t think he really had a grip on the vocab anyway. We put that away. Talked frustration again.

In high school, I stayed in Mexico for two weeks as part of an “I visit your country, you visit mine” four week exchange thing. While there I just completely clammed up. Everyday was exhaustion. I slept at any free moment. I walked around staring, but I was petrified of eye contact. And I had tissues stuffed up my nose (bizarre allergy issues in Mexico). I tried to get by purely on facial expressions. Don’t do that. You will look insane. You will.
Have I mentioned how proud I am of these people that I'm meeting with? They rock. Even if it seems like their worlds are rocking. And it feels like they have rocks in their mouths. Hmm, all the meanings of the word "rock".
… Frustrated yet?

Bless you, Yuki.  You just keep rockin’ it. Bless you, friend.