Olumayowa TP-10

I met with Joe during the weekend for dinner and our first tutoring session. He is still taking a class at CIES to improve his speaking and as the date of his speak test (for teaching Physics in the fall) draws closer and closer, he wants to practice lecturing to others so that his accent and pronunciation could be improved. He had the idea of bringing pictures, which he would show to me and tell a story about; I thought this was a great idea because I certainly did not want to hear a physics lecture.
When he asked me about this activity, I was like "Yeah, sure, no problem!" but I didn't consider what this would entail; I already know that Joe is very self-conscious about both his accent and pronunciation, but did not realize that this would be the first time that I would have to call him out on some of the things that he does regularly, like how often he switches his "L" with "R" (to say "lice" instead of "rice") and how he sometimes will forget important syllables when pronouncing long words (like saying "Wicosin Tate University" rather than "Wisconsin State University"). Luckily he didn't take it hard on himself when I corrected his mistakes but it took his a bit to get his storytelling momentum going again. I forgot an important tip from the Snow textbook that mentions waiting until the student is done before correcting "beautiful mistakes", I totally stopped him at every interval to tell him what he did wrong. That likely got him overthinking things and also slightly forgetting what he had been doing before he was stopped. I hope he doesn't resent me and wants to keep on going with tutoring sessions, I really enjoyed it! (especially since he bought me dinner)

Here's one awesome picture from the session that Joe described expertly as an Animal Planet narrator: