Benjamin_TP_#7

Date/Time: 1/24/15 1 pm
Location: CIES
Topic/Skill: Presentation practice
Feedback provided to tutee: Vocabulary building, pronunciation help, cultural lesson
Lesson:
I met wit Shuo before CIES classes in the lounge area. She had brought with her a presentation he had give over something she was passionate about. We had been texting about the prompt, and I was afraid she did not know what the term "passionate" mean, because she wanted to write about Chinese food or a trip to Germany. I explained to her what it mean to be passionate about something and she seemed to have decided to write about a director she loves. However, when we met she had written a very well composed presentation about movie marketing. We worked through a few grammar issues in the presentation and I made her present it two me several time. We also talked about making the presentation much shorter and how student presentations need to have less content on the screen and more content expressed verbally. We also had a lengthy discussion about several idioms.

Shuo asked me about how she should handle a situation in her apartment. She does not like her roommate's boyfriend but he had offered to cook the roommates dinner. She did not want to attend and was wondering if it would be rude if she did not. I told her she should go and that she might like him if she got to know him. She asked me what kind of conversation might be taboo for such a dinner and naively told her that Americans would probably talk about anything. I asked her what she would talk about in such a situation in China. She told me she and her friends would ask the boy how many girlfriend he had in the past and why they broke up. I told her she had found a taboo! haha.