Jia, Hanan and I go together on Monday for another tutoring session and I guess this week it just one of those critical times where everyone is falling apart!
We started the class in one of the classrooms at CIES, and I wanted to drop a bit of the grammar oriented tutoring to try and focus on composition since I have read the latest papers by both of them and they need to work on their sentence structure. We started with writing on the board what ideas they have on what you can do on a free day. With brainstorming came many sentences and actions, until the board was full. Then I asked them how they would organize a composition on ‘What would you do on a free day?’ and how they simply had to combine and connect what they had already said. I was going to give them some time to actually write the text and then go over the structures when Jia freaked out. She was having boyfriend problems and was a mess, and could not concentrate on the writing. It was hugging time and chocolate time, so I stopped the tutoring session and all three of us went to Circle K, I bought some snacks for all of us (and diet coke to compensate, of course) and we sat at one of the small booths to finish the lesson.
The informal setting had helped Jia calm down and I decided we would just finish the pronouns activities we’d started the previous day. This way Hanan wouldn't feel bad about the time she was taking off from her son to be in the tutoring, and she'd feel as if she'd accomplished something. Although relative pronouns became an issue - and I discovered how much I actually don’t know about them while trying to explain them- we ended up finishing all the pronoun activities. We went over ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ together, because Hanan preferred to do it as a group instead of filling it up first and then correcting, and it ended up being a very good idea. It kept Jia concentrated and not overwhelmed, and they both could explain why they chose one form of pronouns or another to each other! They really liked the story, I thought it was funny how they really enjoyed a children’s tale. I guess no one ever truly grows up! It ended the class on a lighter note and, I hope, kept Jia from worrying for a while.
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