Austin TP 10+ 11

So now that my old tutees have all abandoned me, I had to find some new ones. The first one is Yuki. We met first in the morning, and just got to know each other. We met again in the afternoon, where I helped him with his homework.

I learned that Yuki is from Japan, and that he is majoring in sports management. He really likes basketball and wants to be the GM of an NBA team. I think that's a killer idea, though it might be hard to implement if you never played the game. Anyway, I found out that Yuki is a level 3 speaker, and it shows. However, one thing I realized right away when talking was a deficiency in geography. He seemed to have a vague understanding of where Tallahassee, or Florida, was on the map. I asked him if the instructors at CIES ever go over American geography. He said no. This was something I learned in Civics class in middle school, as Yuki had to learn Japanese geography (he says he's not so good at that either) I asked him where New York was, and he said "somewhere in the North". Just another thing for us to work on. I'll have him naming all 50 states when we're done.

I also learned that the Japanese people borrow alot from their Chinese cousins, but that their culture is their own. The Ainu people are the most original inhabitants of the Japanese mainland, during the Jomon period. However, there must have been contact between the islands and China, because their characters (alphabet) are so similar.

We met again in the afternoon, and he showed me his homework, and some classwork he did poorly on. When I looked over the activity, I found it confusing and difficult even for me. The questions were poorly worded and the instructions vague. Many of the questions were opinion based and could have more than one answer, and yet Yuki was marked wrong on alot of them. However, I found nothing wrong with many of his answers. (In a couple instances, the instructor was flat out wrong in the answers she gave, which concerned me. And those were the multiple choice ones.)

However, the mistakes were not all one sided. Yuki has some work to do on his own. His biggest problem, I noticed, is the distinction between plural and singular. When a pronoun is plural, it must stand for a noun that is plural, not singular. And the same goes for a singular pronoun, but Yuki liked to mix and match them. For example, "they" stood for "the fish". He, she, or it, wouldn't make sense their, but he used "He". A beautiful mistake.

Also, I taught Yuki how to look at words he doesn't know, find the root, and then figure out the meaning without looking it up. For example, "mobility" and "adaptability". I told him to get rid of the suffix "ity" and find the root (the first half of the word) "Mobility" becomes Mobile, so the ability to move, and "adaptability" to "adaptable", so he changed the nouns into adjectives, and then back again. This is a trick I learned in middle school that gets rid of the need (in most cases) of a dictionary.

I feel like I'm getting better at this every time, so I look forward to more sessions.