Suzanne-TP 4

Last week, Mohammed and I had our last two tutoring sessions; I'll talk about the first one in this post and the second in another post. The session before, I had asked Mohammed to look up another TED video and take notes using the abbreviations we had gone over to see if his note-taking skills would improve. I gave him a few suggestions, including the ones that we had posted on our Blackboard, but I didn't expect him to pick what he did. Weirdly, he chose the video from Chimamanda Adichie on the danger of a single story. This surprised but delighted me, since I had already watched that video and loved it. It also proved to be slightly problematic. I'm not sure if he felt as though he had to stick with his choice even if he didn't completely understand it, but that's what happened. But the positive first - I looked over his notes and was pleased to find that he used some abbreviations (like b/c and w/) and, not only that, but that his handwriting seemed to be a little better and his thoughts more complete. He said that he watched the video twice through and didn't pause it, which was great news to my ears. He also said he liked it, which was double-great news. But he had a difficult time comprehending what she was saying. I explained that he shouldn't feel discouraged because her accent was very strong, and that I was proud of him for sticking by it and doing as well as he did with it. I asked him if he felt like our sessions had helped his note-taking skills in class and he said that they had.

This took up most of the time of the session, but towards the end, I started to realize that I didn't have any material left in terms of note-taking, since Mohammed seemed like he felt comfortable and, though I asked him a few times, couldn't give me anything in terms of finding new ways to help his skills. I don't know if it was because it was the end of the CIES session or if my worries about him from the beginning were true, but we reached an impasse. So I told him that I'd brainstorm some activity to help his speaking (since in our last session he had mentioned his feelings of inadequacy about that). Which bring us to...