Koo and I met at Strozier library in our usual spot. She's begun a habit of beginning our sessions with a series of questions she's gathered during the days since our last session. I feel so lucky to have such a curious and observant tutee. We talked about graveyard jargon. Koo drew a series of diagrams and pointed to each, asking for the equivalents. A coffin is the ceremonial container in which a person is buried. A grave is the place where the coffin is buried. A plaque is a marking for a coffin that is underground, much like a tombstone. A mausoleum is an above-ground grave. More expensive, and sometimes holding more than one person.
We then moved on to our vocabulary and reading exercises. Koo has very high expectations of herself when it comes to perfecting her pronunciation, and doesn't shy away from pronounced a given word or syllable twenty times before she successfully says it. I try to encourage her as well as push her. Her steadfastness has earned her a great deal of progress in such a short period of time. I really love teaching speaking! The learning process is a lot more immediate. We talked about the subtle differences between sinister and other words like bad, or evil. She enjoys developing her precision with vocabulary, as it allows her to communicate with more detail in English.
We ended by talking about the phrase to draw and its various uses. I ended up defining the word as "to make something appear, bring out something." The uses aren't practically related. I think it's an interesting evolutionary track for a phrase.
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