Heather - Tutoring - Week 6

Chomy and I successfully met at the library on Wednesday evening. We had a new element to our sessions this week, the addition of Xin. Knowing that Xin would be us made me revise my approach to our session. My thoughts on what to do cleared when Xin mentioned that she still has trouble when she goes to restaurants and also lacks comfort. A little lightbulb went bing! and I knew I could use my speaking lesson plan with them and also record the session. Chomy had called earlier and requested help with registering for an online driving school. Unfortunately we didn't get that done because we didn't know which class she should be signing up for and that really was her biggest problem. You know, for the things which are confusing for us native born Americans or long term residents I can't begin to imagine just how much more confusing they are for people from other countries and cultures. If I don't like something like dealing with paperwork for insurance companies, I'm pretty sure someone who has even less fluency in English doesn't enjoy it much either.

Anyway, after discussing the class registration stuff we started in our speaking lesson! I will say that I learned a lot as a teacher from this scenario. One thing I learned is that a lesson plan can quickly become virtually useless except for the conception of the idea you had. I was scrambling to complete a short powerpoint listing the vocab, showing pictures and then the next slide had vocab and definitions. I decided to do this because I realized I didn't have any other way to really share the vocabulary with them. I also wrote the directions and separate roles on different slides. These I used while explaining things out loud. Our lesson was on going to a restaurant or ordering out. The ladies did a fab job with the definitions! We said the words out loud together and worked on defining them. I was very pleased. Of course, as our lesson progressed into the pair work there was one or two more words that I discovered I should have added to our list to go over.

It turns out that Chomy has more comfort and familiarity with eating out in restaurants, which I hope served to encourage Xin. This made her a little stronger in the pair work and a little more creative. As they worked, I sat back and wouldn't let them use me for questions, that worked during the first round of the activity at least. The second round, ordering out, was a bit more unfamiliar and they were unsure of somethings so they had questions to ask and I let them. As I sat back watching and recording, I learned about the things they have trouble with, what they didn't really understand and saw just who true the blind leading the blind is. At the end of round 1 we reviewed some of the problem areas and moved on to the next round where they switched menus. I feel like the lesson was maybe the most beneficial for me because I walked away from it with a better understanding of how teaching works, of how you have to be able to keep up a flow even when things catch you off guard, be flexible, adjustable and understanding. Though I was really proud of my ladies' performances. Perhaps, the lesson was at the right challenge level for Xin and a little below an appropriate challenge level for Chomy. We closed with reviewing, and using a presentation grading rubric to discuss performance and work on self-evaluation as well as getting feedback from me on their performance. We would read the descriptions, I would ask how they thought they did, where they thought they fell in those categories and then tell them where I thought they feel. Our session was cut a little abruptly due to Chomy having to leave, but we got all the bases covered.