Francis- TP 8

This post will be of the last session, Conversational or Tutorial, I did with people I found through TEFL. Actually, this tutoring session was not with a TEFL student but with my TP's hubby, Seong. Jee had to go to NYC for a dance workshop but had asked me if I could her husband before she left. We met only once before I left but agreed to stay in touch, maybe do a Skype session to keep working on his pronunciation, and do a few more session when I came back to Tally a week before classes start. Sadly, I lost my phone when I went home, loosing all my numbers including Seong's and Jee's, and have been unsuccessful in reaching them. Thankfully, I managed to find a couple of ladies from Ecuador who were willing to become my tutee and conversation partner. But more on those sessions later.

Seong is a PhD student for Sports Psychology and he will be teaching a class, Education Psychology. This will be the first class he will teach in English and this made him a bit unsure. He speaks very well since he has been studying in the states for a while. He has mastered the pesky Rs and Ls. What he said he wanted to work on is his tendency to freeze when he looses his "English train of thought." He explained this to me with with a story from his Tae Kwon Do days. He explained that he was a choker when it came time for competitions and that this is what kind of led him to be interested in Sports psychology. All this, Seong told me during the activity we did.

I figured that I would try to simulate him lecturing by having him just do an outline of what I would like him to tell me. Since it was out first time, I took it as an introductory session, and asked him to explain to me what led him to chose Sports Psychology and what he would like to do after graduationg. I timed the outline writing to only 5 minutes. He was done before the 5 minutes were up and we moved on to his "lecture." Seong had a shaky first half. He later explained to me that his mind just stopped a couple of times and he had to recover and get back on point. The outline did not help much in his recovery because it was pretty bare so I suggested he created a more detailed outline for his firt few classes just in case. As he got into the lecture more, and I think his mind got used to the flow his lecture was more fluid. Seong has no problem speaking in front of many people. He has been teaching for some time now. It just seems that his mind, in English, is not exercised enough to take the challenge.

Before we ended the session we agreed to meet so he could try his first few lessons on. He would contact me when he had the first chapter he had to teach ready for lecture but because I lost my phone I could not do any follow up after he did not contact me around the time we agreed. I have yet to hear from either Seong or Jee. I hope to see them again. Personally, I keep getting more insecure about my tutoring sessions. I have had really bad luck keeping up sessions with all my tuttees. For some reason or another the sessions with both of my original tuttees ended prematurely. I hope I was a decent tutor to them and will work on bettering my sessions.