Last week Ramin sent out an email asking the CIES teachers to inform their students that tutors would be available if the felt they needed tutoring. Today McKenzie and I met with those students in the lounge at CIES. The response was a bit overwhelming for the two of us. I was very happy to hear the responsibility would be shared by Ade.
One of the students I met with was Tuba. Tuba is from a small town in Western Turkey. She needed help with her composition homework. She was given the task of writing a comparitive essay about her home town in Turkey and Tallahassee. I was suprised to find the many similarites between the two.
She had a great start on her essay. She was given a template to help compose the essay. She had filled in all of the topic sentences in each paragraph and had chosen the main idea. Her thoughts were clear and her supporting ideas were solid.
I found that she was having the most problems with some of the sentence structures within the essay. She had difficulty understanding that her home town was located in western Turkey and not "west of" Turkey. I also had to explain the difference between a city which has alot of greenery and a "green city" in the environmental sense of the word.
The hour that was alloted today for tutoring flew by before I knew it. I was happy with the amount we were able to accomplish.
I met with and tutored Aylin, a CIES student from Turkey today. I don't know if she was one of the students you let me borrow or not, but we worked on an outline for her essay today too. It was my first time helping a student with homework during tutoring hour. I asked her at the end if I helped her at all and she said thanked me over and over again. She boosted my self-esteem like I hopefully boosted hers!
ReplyDeleteI had a student last week with the same topic. I remember it was difficult to explain to him the difference between "nature" and "environment." The essay topic was really confusing for him but I tried to clarify things.
ReplyDeleteI hope the initial shock of the first day has eased for you Lori ;)
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