Camille-TP5

On Wednesday, I met with Sunghee in Strozier (which has now become our traditional time and meeting place). On this particular, I requested Sunghee to bring any materials she would like to work on so we can work on her schoolwork together, and also so I will have an idea of the exact level she is on, and what specifically she needs help in. She gave me one of her assignments which was to formulate a story using extremely complex vocabulary which included "interrogation," "suspect," "guilty" and "antiquated." Unfortunately she did not know a majority of the words nonetheless did she know how to apply them to a story, it was at this point I could see the extreme frustration foreign students must face every single day when placed in a language school. Also, it was difficult for me to help her with the assignment initially because I wanted to feed her the setences but I had to resist in order for her to develop an understanding of the material. After I explained each of the vocabulary words and used them in a sentence, I then tried to help her come up with a story to apply the vocabulary to, but she also had a hard time with that. After many frustrating and tedious minutes had passed, I finally thought of an activity. We played a game where I start to make up a story and then she will fill in what happens next and so on and so forth. It is like a game of ping pong where were kept bouncing ideas off of each other in order to get our creative juices flowing. This seemed to get a reaction out of her and she enjoyed the game thoroughly. From this I told her to apply this idea to her story when she does it for homework, she did not want me to help her with it anymore because I think she was embarrassed by her low level of understanding. After that we worked on one reading comprehension exercise from her TOEFL book. We tried to work through the passage but again she didn't really understand many of the words and I would have to go back and explain the entire story every couple of sentences, after that I tried to help her answer the questions. But some of the questions were extremely confusing, even to me! From this tutoring lesson, I have learned that I need to put aside my frustration and level with my tutee in order for anything to get accomplished.