Will Stone - TP 2

 

I met Shaykhah at noon in room 415. We had arranged out meeting mostly through brief text messages. We did not thoroughly address what she wanted to work on in our session.  She was waiting in an empty classroom. Immediately she asked me if I had a newspaper. She told me that she wanted to practice reading a newspaper and explained that it often contained numerous words that she didn’t understand and served as a practical application of reading skills. I wasn’t aware of her preference of reading newspapers over other material, so I had neglected to bring a full newspaper. Fortunately, I had some assorted material in my bag, including a catalog and some old school papers. She chose one of my old school papers about the apostles. At first I was a little apprehensive about the religious nature of the material, but she didn’t seem to mind and in fact some of definition explanations were aided by her familiarity with the subject material. Unfortunately, many of the words were academic jargon that pertained to the apostles and the religious art depicting them, made in the medieval period. We worked through about eight or so words before she became discouraged by the complexity and impracticality of a majority of the words. I found it difficult to explain words like ‘apply’ or ‘functionary,’ that exist in a more abstract capacity. We then switched to the catalog briefly, but she soon found that also limiting in her vocabulary expansion. I then proceeded to question her about her class work and homework. She pulled out some work sheets that covered some grammar topics pertaining to preposition functions. Shaykhah was having difficulty with ‘of’ and ‘but.’ However, we did not finish correcting her paper, as she had to go pick up her son from after school care. We arranged to meet the following Wednesday at the same time and that I would bring a newspaper.  The thing that I found most challenging about our tutoring session was explaining some words that I had internalized to the point that they just kind of come out in the right places without much regard to what they actually mean. I found it an interesting opportunity to examine/conjure working definitions for more abstract words.