"Speaking in the Flow" - tutoring sesh 3

I saw my tutoree last night. Sometimes it's hard to just go with the flow. It's as if I wanted to arrive and my tutoree say, "this is what I want to work on" It doesn't work like that. Maybe he has no idea what he wants. Maybe he does but can't talk about it or find the words. So I can't really prepare anything. Or at least, I can but it takes some time to determine who he is and what will best serve him. For me, that means being in the flow with him. It's difficult though because I want to know immediately what would benefit him the most. But I can't. I mean, I asked him, but he didn't have a clear answer so I'm just trying to find it. I'm like a surfer out on the waves waiting to find the right one to ride.

Maybe I should swim toward a wave. But it's difficult. Sometimes I have a board. Sometimes I ride to the ocean. No really, we seem to be finding our groove in a little exercise based on some of the homework he has from his previous tutor. In this exercise, there are several words he has to make a sentence from. There'll be an article, a subject, a verb and an object. It's practically like the sentence is there for him already but it is still a little difficult for him and takes some time. I noticed he likes to write the sentences out and this works for me too. It forces me to slow down and support him as he's doing it which is always good for me. Slowing down that is. He enjoys doing this. It makes him a little calmer and his breath flows evenly. So I know it's like a yoga for him

I innovated the lesson by tying to draw it out a little. That is, I could see the calming effect it was having on him AND me and it IS writing so I decided to ask him how to use the verbs in the "pasado". You see they are in "presente", so this is a no mean feat. Also I remember that in foreign language class thaty would be like lesson 9 so I figured we're making some progress.

He also wants to know "el futuro" so we worked on that too. So I get him to write some sentence and write it again and again in el pasado y el futuro. The only thing that changes is the verb tense but I think it places an important linguistic, cognitive structure in his topographic learning arc (tla). It puts a sense of time there and I think this is inspiring further movement in the forward momentum of his learning arc.