Will Stone - TP 8

Shaykhah was waiting in room 409. i asked how her classes were going and she told that they were going well. I had brough a newspaper with articles concerning the hazing scandal at FAMU. She immerdiately asked what a drum line was. I explained that at some schools had teams of musicians playing in unison rather than having dedicated athletic teams. The article lead to a discussion about hazing and the culture around hazing in social clubs. She told me that she wasn't as familiar with some  American social customs, but recofnized the concept of hazing. This segued into a conversation where I explained Historic universities, specifically how FAMU is a historic African American university. She was still curious about what a drum line was, so I pulled up a youtube video and after about thirty seconds she told me that she understood and wanted to keep reading through the paper. There was a follow up article a few pages later concerning the fate of FAMU’s president. Shaykhah told me she knew what a president was, but that she didn’t understand the context of the article. I tried to as clearly as possible explain the situation regarding the hazing scandal and how it was the president’s responsibility to correct the situation or take the blame for the shortcomings of his post. she told me she understood what most of the words meant, but that she was having a harder time determining context or what the story meant. It hadn’t occurred to me that even if a person understood all of the words in a given text, that the actual context/purpose of the story may be shrouded in cultural traditions/ideas that may be difficult to grasp on first reading without supplemental knowledge. I tried to explain the whole scandal as revealed through the two articles but I could tell that Shaykhah was losing interest. after another minute or so she stood up and told me that she needed to go pick up her son from school and that she would contact me for our next meeting.