Rebecca TP #15

Tutoring Session #15

Feb 26th, 2015

19:30-20:30

My meeting with Ahmed this evening was mainly to assess how he is doing in the current session at CIES. I haven’t seen the tutoring lists yet, so I’m not sure if he signed up for tutoring again or not, or if I will continue being his tutor.

Like our first meeting, I asked him what he finds to be his strengths and weaknesses in English. He gave me that “everything is fine” wave, so I continued to press. After working with him for a session, I’ve learned for myself that his speaking tends to be strongest, while there are more lapses in writing.

I asked him if there were any topics he’d want to know more about if we kept tutoring, and that these could be anything, not just American culture. One that he was persistent on was school life, and the schooling environment in America. Because we had enough time this session we started to discuss it. I told him that the United States schooling system tends to be strict, but that it is not the strictest system in the world. We don’t have twelve-hour school days, but students are expected to take part in extracurricular activities, even in college. Being a good student is not enough. I told him that even a student with perfect grades is generally not a perfect student if that is the only thing they do. When he asked how students can be expected to do all these things, I told him that it is because students tend to be very disciplined, and the CIES teachers try to enforce these standards in these classes, which is why they sometimes appear strict.

I asked him to think over these aspects of school in the US and to compare them to his schooling in Kuwait, and we would discuss them next time.