Will Stone - TP 11

I met up with Mohammad in the lobby of the Johnston building like we had at previous tutoring sessions. We checked out a room and as soon as we entered he took out the Calvin and Hobbes collection and his workbook. He told me that he liked the comic strips for the most part, though at some places he didn’t necessarily understand what was happening in some of the panels. He flipped through his workbook and found some of the exercises that we had been working on last session and I checked through them to make sure he had answered correctly. After I checked his work I asked him if there was anything in particular that he wanted to work on. He said that he was tired of the workbook activities and wanted to try to read through a newspaper article like his sister had been doing. I retrieved the article about the tropical storm and opened it up so that Mohammad might start reading through it. I found it interesting that Mohammad picked up on some of the same words that  Shaykhah had entered into her word log. I had never seen Mohammad use a word log so I asked him if he kept one. When he told me that he did not, I explained to him some of the benefits of keeping one. He seemed receptive to learning new words this way, so I set him up a word log on a blank page of one of his notebooks. we read through two articles and by the time we finished about half of the page was filled with words, definitions, and explanations. After the articles, I asked how he felt about the words he had chosen and we went through and a conversation about all of the words and what they meant and how they function in casual conversations generally. Mohammad had some of the roughest speaking skills of any of the conversation partners or students that I had worked with over the course of the session. His syntactical grammar was choppy and much of his speech was wired in his accent. We talked for about thirty minutes or so before concluding our session, I asked if there was anything he would like to work on and he told me he was interested in reading a Superman comic. I told him that I would see what I could do.