Jaime TP2

Last Friday I had my first formal tutor lesson with Jee. Jee had mentioned that she wanted to focus on improving her writing and that she was having difficulty determining the meaning of “that” and “whom” in a sentence and when to use commas. With this in mind, I came prepared with a wipe-off board and the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack built”. I thought that the nursery rhyme appropriate as Jee has a small son, and I could introduce her to ‘Mother Goose’ and nursery rhymes.

Jee picked up on the lesson quickly, and we chatted about childhood nursery rhymes and stories. But afterwards things got tricky. Take the sentence, “John is marrying the daughter of the famous psychologist who taught at Berkeley.”
As English speakers (according to my linguistics class- I’m going out on a limb here), we will automatically attribute the ‘who’ to the psychologist. There is a famous psychologist at Berkeley and his daughter is going to be marrying this John fellow… For Spanish speakers who are not fluent in English they will automatically attribute the ‘who’ to the daughter. This changes the meaning of the sentence- somewhere in the world is a young lady who teaches at Berkeley, has a famous psychologist father, and is marrying John. Jee explained to me that as a Korean student she views the sentence similar to (what my linguistic book states) what a Spanish student would. That went well enough- I simply explained to Jee that in most cases it would be safe to attribute the “who description” to last noun/subject mentioned before the who. (Does this make sense?)

And then darling Jee hit me with a curve ball… She asked me about commas and whos and asked if there would be a difference inserting a comma into the sentence.

John is marrying the daughter of the psychologist, who taught at Berkeley. I stared at the sentence- as far as I know is grammatically correct, and from the way I would read it would be that the daughter did in fact do the teaching. I tried coming up with another sentence which was rather difficult. I find these things are usually based on context and told her as much.

After we got past that debacle, we worked on making sentences longer with adverbs and adjectives. I explained that sentences can be added upon and explained the phrase “with a fiery passion”. For the rest of the time we worked on sentences.

i.e. I ran to the car. > I ran quickly to the car.> I ran quickly to the locked car. >I ran quickly through the rain to the locked car. > Breathless, I ran quickly through the rain to the locked car.
I tried to explain to Jee that in narrative writings detail is a good thing, that to imagine what sort of situation would make her run to her car? How would she be feeling? I told her that by using adjectives and adverbs she could convey her feelings to an audience. I then gave her simple sentences to build upon, step by step.
We then spoke about formal writing and I taught her alliteration and onomatopoeia. This sparked Jee to ask me about pajama parties, and American culture. I told her about pajama parties/slumber parties/sleepovers/spending the night, which apparently differs from boys to girls. Special thanks to Carolos for his boy perspective on the matter. J