Sarah TP#3

March 19, 2014

Prior to my second tutoring session with Ali I did a little bit of research on local services for the blind. I had been interested in possibly getting Ali some materials in Braille for his studies, but I found that Braille is being phased out in favor of audio. I spoke to someone at the local division of Blind Services about Ali's situation and was told that they cannot provide him with any services because he is not a Florida resident. They did, however, give me some advice to make sure that Ali receives the necessary accommodations when he takes the GRE (like requesting a reader), and I talked with him about this.

To start things off, Ali and I did some catching up and I explained the meaning of "stressed." He decided he was feeling the same thing. Since Ali didn't have any questions about his course work, we just read the news. I picked out a few articles on archeology from this website to read to him because I was unsure about what would be level-appropriate. He quickly became frustrated with how brief the articles were, so I found a relatively easy read from NPR on kids' food preferences from an evolutionary perspective. I first explained the idiom "sweet tooth," which was very easy for Ali to understand. He offered me a pastry and some candy (his new favorite word). Ali had me make an entry with the day's date in the notepad on his computer, and whenever we came across a word he wasn't familiar with he would ask me to add the word to this list so that he could go back to it later. Like I said before, he's very eager to learn. It looked as if he had an entry for every day since he arrived in Tallahassee.

Once we got through the article, Ali wrote about it using the format (thesis followed by 3 supporting ideas) and transition words (to begin with, additionally, however) that he learned in class. He told me he "LOVES to write summarized." He was able to synthesize the information and make some insightful points including creative suggestions for parents to get their kids interested in healthy foods. While he got his message across, what he produced was riddled with syntactical errors. As for error correction, I really didn't know where to start. I decided to congratulate him on a job well done (he's only been in the U.S. for a month!) and to focus on subject-verb agreement and the use of quantifiers and determiners.

Before I left, I felt I had to admit to Ali that I don't really know what I'm doing. He told me not to worry, and that I am "very smart in my tutoring." We agreed to figure it out together.