Will Stone - TP 12

I met up with Mohammad at our usual room in the Johnston building. I told him if he rented the room I would bring coffee. We settled in and began working. I asked Mohammad what he wanted to work on and he pulled out his workbook, flipping to a page with an activity focusing on the proper use of the word ‘what.’ He told me that he had trouble understanding how to use what and didn’t understand why he kept hearing everyone say ‘what.’ I explained how ‘what’ was is used in reference to an object, or, general state of being, as a way to inquire or express quality about a specific object. Mohammad still looked confused, so I explain to him that it was commonly used as a question so that someone can inquire about specific information from another person, and that he probably heard it from other people asking about his interests. By the time my explanation had come sort of full circle, Mohammad seemed to have grasped how people had been using the word towards him. With that explanation, I located the activity that used the word ‘what,’ and walked Mohammad through it. It only took him a few minutes to complete the activity. I checked over it to make sure he had completed it accurately. Afterwards we talked about what had been going on with each other, so as give him practice speaking as well as exercise his new understanding of the word ‘what.’ We spent about fifteen or so minutes talking and asking ‘what’ questions to each other before we moved on to reading. In our last meeting, Mohammad had expressed interest in reading a Superman comic, so in the few days between meetings I picked up a few issues of the early issues of the relaunched Action Comics for him to read. I watched him flip through it for a few minutes. After some silence he turned to me and told me that he could not read this, so I asked him to start from the begining and we went through and found words to add to his vocabulary list. It made sure to distinguish between ficticious words and words that could be used in casual conversation. We finished a whole issue before he told me that he needed to go and have dinner with his family. I asked him t continue writing down words he had trouble with and that we would go over them next time we met.