On January 28th, I met with Mohammed and Zhonghu at the Grandmarc apartments for tutoring. As Mohammed came late, I had time to talk with Zhonghu before the lesson and got to know him. He is an only child from China. He told me that there is no heating in Chinese homes, so he has to wear a lot of layers at home and school--it made me realize how lucky I am to live in America and have access to central heating and cooling.
When Mohammed arrived, we regrouped in a smaller room and talked about affixes--Zhongyu's homework--and we discussed their importance. Since we had just recently watched a video of a teacher doing this exact exercise in TEFL class, I had a slight idea of how to present the information to my tutees, and we used the board heavily during this exercise. When I asked them about submarine, Mohammed thought of "marine" as the military branch; I explained he wasn't wrong, but in this case, it has to do with the ocean. That lead us to marine biology, and then biology alone (the study of life; the study of life in the ocean). As a native speaker, I don't think about how important affixes really are, so I enjoy these lessons about as much as my tutees. After covering the affixes listed in the chapter, we moved on to talk a little bit about observable and hidden traits. It was very pertinent that the previous week I had talked with Mohammed about the idioms "tip of the iceberg" and "breaking the ice," and then the next day in Ramin's class we had done the iceberg worksheet, so I was able to tie the two lessons together. We talked about their concepts of time: they both agreed that if it was a friend, time doesn't matter--their friends wouldn't mind them being late--but they would never be late if the person was older or a higher rank (like a manager) than them.
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