Mary_TP12

A lesson was learned the hard way today, unfortunately. This was the last session David and I had before he took the TOEFL, and what was supposed to be just a brush-up review, turned into a four hour all out cram session in reading! David had told me previously that he didn’t have trouble in any of the other sections of TOEFL except for the speaking, but in reality he had the most trouble with reading and had such an aversion to it that he didn’t want to practice it. We spend most of this extra long session concentrating on one essay and its practice questions. I had him skim it once; he could discern that it was about ants. I asked him what about them? This time I had him read the whole thing encouraging him not to get discouraged by the words he did not know (it was admittedly difficult vocabulary). We then started answering the questions, there were only ten, but it took about two hours to get through them all. I did my best to not give him any of the answers, but instead guide him to what the text can explain. It was an extremely long process, but the point I was trying to get across was that he is capable of finding the answers on his own. The moral of this story for me is when tutoring or teaching you need to find a balance between topics and don’t rely on your students acknowledging their shortcomings. I understand the rationale behind diagnostic tests now.