Kayla_TP_#1

Date/Time: January 20th, 8:00 pm

Location: Dave's Pizza Garage

My first tutoring session was with Kaori from Japan! It was kind of hard to get in touch with her for about two weeks, but when I finally got a hold of her on Facebook it was easy to plan and set up our first session. I picked her up from her place and took her to get some pizza. She stressed to me that she really wanted to focus on speaking skills, but she also brought a composition activity that we worked on. It was about comparing and contrasting her hometown and Tallahassee. She said that they were similar because they were both "county." I explained that cities are in counties, and counties are in states (Tallahassee, City--> Leon, County--> Florida, State). Instead, she meant that both her hometown and Tallahassee weren't large cities, but still had plenty of people living in both places. Instead, I had her say that both are "small cities" or "towns." She had a few small spelling errors, like saying that roads are "nerrow." Instead of explicitly correcting her (it's an "a," not an "e"), I said "one of the vowels is incorrect in that word." She immediately corrected the misspelling!

We then got to eat pizza. She loved her calzone! We then realized that the restaurant was about to close, so we went to Strozier to finish up our lesson. She had a little notebook that (I assume) she uses to write down words she doesn't understand. She wrote down at least eight words that were all synonyms with "sad." I starred the most used words, like "depressed" and "mournful," and then explained these words to her.

At the end of the tutoring session, I took her home and she was SO excited and thankful. Tutoring other people of different cultures, seeing their happiness, and getting to make friends with these amazing people is really affecting my psyche for the better. :)