Tutoring week 1 Rita Schwab

I finally got a student to tutor through the library coordinator Karen
Gotti. She has been so very helpful.
Anyway, Yongheon Park and I met for the very first time at the library last night. He is a student from Korea. He has been in this country for 6 months and is working on his Master's degree in Public Administration. He comes from Seoul, South Korea, the capital which houses 11 million people. Seoul is about 600 km from the Chinese border. Yongheon works for the Seoul Metropolitan Government, who sent him to this country to receive his Master's degree. His studies are all paid for by his government. Upon his return, he is guaranteed his job back.
He is taking 3 courses this semester: Health Care and Finance
Budget Management which includes
Accounting, Contracting and Management of Assets

and Human Resource Management, which includes
Recruiting, Training, Promoting and Job positioning.

This information was the first part of our conversation. Yongheon is entirely familiar with the terminologies of his subject, which was of great relief to me as I know nothing about his field.
His vocabulary is excellent, his grammar is quite good - he has issues with conjugation - but his pronunciation is rather choppy and he does not pronounce certain consonants correctly, in specific the letter f. As it turns out there is no letter f in the Korean alphabet and saying "f" is difficult for Yongheon. Which brought us to practising "f" and a list of f-words. And here the conversation turned funny, as the meaning of the f-word was not familiar with Yongheon and I decided to educate him about it. We also decided to make a list of f-words for the next meeting so he can practise the words to himself in privacy.

Earlier in our conversation I asked him how I could help him, in which way my tutoring could be most beneficial to him. And he know his weaknesses, which were primarily in conversation English and pronunciation. He wants help with everyday lingo, jargon, idioms and casual language. Like he asked me what the word 'freak' meant and the word 'punk' and the expression 'that beats me'.
Then I asked him if he gets around in the 'real' world outside of the college and he just laughed. He says that he has a difficult time ordering food and does not understand the menus. Especially the Mexican menus. Again we laughed because I said I don't
understand the Mexican menus either. So I suggested to bring in several to-go menus, which was a hard for him to believe that you could as a menu to go. Next time we will go over the menus and see how I can help him understand food and ordering and talking to a waiter easier. And we will be practising f- words. I will have a list for him.
We met until 8:30 pm. His character is rather formal and stiff, but I think I livened things up a bit and we parted comfortably.