Benjamin_TP_#5

Date/Time: 1/21/15 9:30 am
Location: Strozier Starbucks
Topic/Skill: TOEL Reading exercise
Feedback provided to tutee: Vocabulary building, pronunciation help, discussion about race relations
Lesson:

I met with Shuo again today and we worked on a TOEFL Reading practice set. She says she needs to get her TOELF score higher.  The practice set was a reading about Kinetoscopes and early cinema. This reading helped me teach her quite a bit of grammar and explain some Latin affixes. We also worked on pronunciation. I made her read the passage, then asked her what words and phrases she did not understand. I then read the passage again to her and asked her to explain to me the parts that I felt she probably did not understand.

Shuo is very anxious about how others perceive her whens he is speaking English. She keep glancing around when she read and was certain that several people got up and left the cafe area because she was reading so poorly. I assured her that was absolutely not true, that no one was even paying attention to us, and noted almost everyone in the cafe had earphones in. I told her that she must overcome this anxiety, because it can inhibit the bettering of her skills, especially speaking.

The reading brought up the topic of minstrel shows, which lead to a discussion of race relation in America. I was prepared for something like this, but I was still astounded by her ignorance toward African-Americans. I do not write that as a judgement, I mean that she is literally ignorant of experiences with black people. She asked me if I like them, if I would date a black person, if black and white people get married here, if they could have babies together, and what the babies would look like. On this subject, talking to Shuo was like talking to a child, as I could tell she was innocently asking me out of curiosity and had no idea. However, it seemed to me that the assumption was that black people were bad. I told her that she must not view people as black or white or any color, but as just people, or she will miss out on some very good friendships in America. She told me she had met one very nice black girl, but had knew a black guy who did a lot drugs. I explained to her that drug use was actually more prevalent among white people here and that perhaps he did drugs because he was bored or did not like his life, not because he was black. This conversation was difficult, and it hard not to fall back on problematic advice like "you can't be racist because it will prevent you from getting a job". I just told her that if people here seemed strange to her, it was not because of the color of their skin, but because she was in a different culture and that she must be open minded to new cultures. I explained to her that some of my very good friends are black and that I myself am mix raced. I hope that it helped her to understand, but it's hard when the reply to my response was "but why do I see white people only with white people and black people only with black people". I told her we are still trying to overcome our racist past, and especially here in the south, people tend to self-segregate.

We did more work on the TOEFL reading but this session last 1.5 hours and she had to go to class.