Charles_TP10

When I was meeting with Majdi he told me about his friend Mg who was also interested in tutoring. I got to meet Mg when I went to dinner with Majdi last night. We exchanged numbers and said we could meet up the next day. Mg texted me and told me that he needed help with some reading so I put together a lesson plan and found some worksheets online. I used the one linked below because Mg told me that he likes science and wants to study physics. We met at Starbucks and worked on the handout. The reading was extensive for him, at around 80% comprehension. I let Mg read the whole passage and then we went over the words he did not understand. Some harder words are in bold so that made it easy to locate them. After we went through the passage together we moved onto the questions. He had to go back to the passage to figure some of the questions but he did not have much trouble with them after that. We finished the worksheet and Mg started to ask me if I knew any special techniques to improve his reading. I explained to him the different types of reading (extensive, intensive, scanning, skimming) and told him that there are side by side books that he can read that will help. I told that it just takes a lot of practice to improve your reading skills and that there is not really a shortcut. Before ending our session Mg told me that he wanted to work on pronunciation so I am going to put together another lesson plan that deals with consonant clusters and other difficult pronunciations in English. 

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.englishforeveryone.org%2FPDFs%2FInformational%2520Passages%2520RC%2520-%2520Helicopters.pdf

Charles_CP4

Today I also met with Elvire for the first time since our class started. Our schedules never really matched up but I wanted to meet with her at least one time before the semester was over. Elvire and I met in CIES and talked about many things for an hour. Elvire is from Ivory Coast and she speaks French. She is planning on completing her TOEFL exam and then moving somewhere else in the U.S as she has a few siblings in different cities. She also said that she might just stay in Tallahassee. She told me that she thought it was a little boring and I agreed with her but I explained that it is summer and half of the student population is gone. She moved here only 3 months ago so she has not gotten to experience a fall or spring semester. I asked Elvire if she had traveled anywhere else and she said that she has been to Togo and Ghana. She told me that in Ghana they speak English. I did not know that, I thought they spoke French much like in The Ivory Coast. Elvire told me that she wants to be a petroleum engineer. We also talked about Abidjan, the city that she is from. She said that Abidjan has very nice beaches. I asked if they had sharks but she did not understand that word at first. I pulled out my phone and translated it to French. It came out as “requin” and she knew exactly what I was talking about. She said that there were not many and she asked if there were any in Tampa. I told her that next to the beach there are some but they are not that big. We talked about where she wants to live in the future and she said that she is unsure. She asked me and I told her that I would like to live anywhere in Europe. She told me that she really wants to go to London. I told her that I went to London last summer and that it is a really nice and clean city. An hour had passed and we decided to go. I really enjoyed talking to Elvire, I have never met someone from Ivory Coast and she is really nice. She is going to international dinner tomorrow night and she really encouraged me to come. 

Charles_TP9

My TP Talal called me and said he needed to meet with me to go over some material before one of his TOEFL exams today. We arranged to meet at lunch time. Talal had to take a reading exam today before he leaves tomorrow early in the morning to go back to his country. Talal and I sat down and I asked what he needed help with. He told me that he did not understand some vocabulary and expressions that are in his book. A lot of his vocabulary was related to soccer and health so they were interesting to him. One term that Talal had some trouble with was “chemotherapy.” I explained to him what a compound word is and how to figure them out. I asked Talal if he knew what therapy was and he did but he still did not notice it within the word. I showed him that he can split the word in two and he noticed “therapy.” Talal did not know what “chemo” meant so I explained some other forms of therapy such as physical therapy and that made sense to him. I told him that chemo has to do with cancer and that type of therapy is used to treat cancer. Explaining to him what a compound word was and showing him how to split the word into two parts really seemed to help him. I helped Talal with a few other words and then he had to go. I wish Talal the best of luck with his education and travels and hopefully we can still meet when he comes back to Tallahassee. 

Kari_TP12

Well, my final tutoring session this afternoon was with Sangwon. He enjoyed our last meeting on Monday with the whole idea of watching a movie and listening to the different accents, and later being asked different questions about what the movie was about. He also liked it because he learned new vocabulary words, so that's what we did again today. Today we watched the movie "The Illusionist", which was different because of the accents, but also because it really required him to listen and pay attention to what was going on. It was one of those movies where it had a twist at the end and revealed certain parts at key points, but left other parts out until the very end. He actually enjoyed the movie a lot except for the very end, I think it confused him more than anything, and I think that confusion came from things being too fast. But he understood the majority of it and only had a few questions about vocabulary throughout the movie, like on the difference between "murmur" and "mumble", "jurisdiction" and "Inspector". Our lesson was similar to what we did on Monday-after we watched the movie, I asked him comprehension questions. Who was who, what did they do, why did they do what they did, what was the reason behind their actions, etc.

Charles_CP3

After tutoring Majdi, he asked if I would like to come to dinner with him. He did not really give me too many details, he just said it is at his friends house and that is was to break fasting for the day. I did not really know what to expect but I didn’t think there would be more than a couple of people there. We walked to my car and on the way I explained to Majdi what fraternity and sorority houses were as we passed them. This was very hard to explain to Majdi because he has never heard of anything like this and because there is still a significant language barrier present. We got to my car and drove over to his friends house. When we got to the door, the first thing I noticed was how many shoes were outside. I knew that this was not going to be a small gathering. As we entered, I saw around 15 people in the house. All of them greeted me kindly and I recognized a few from class observations. On the living room floor was a mat with a bunch of food on it. Everyone was sitting indian style around the mat and eating. I was quickly given a plate with a bunch of food on it and encouraged to eat. I was not sure what I was eating but it was very good. I was also given Muslim coffee which was a bit spicy like chai; very good. They were mainly speaking Arabic but they still included me and they were making jokes. They asked me a lot of questions about where I’m from and what I’m studying. After the first course they cleared out the living room and got in lines to pray. They told me that I could just sit on the side and watch. I wasn’t sure if I could still eat while they were praying so I just waited. It was a very interesting situation, I have never seen Muslims pray in person. After they prayed, they laid down another mat. I wasn’t sure if they were having more food because we had already eaten so much but sure enough there was another course coming out. They started with a soup that I didn’t get much information on but it was very good. I was told to add some lemon to it. After there was a pasta and baked chicken dish with some sort of pita bread. I asked them what type of bread it was but they did not really know how to say it in English. To complete the course was some watermelon. After we finished eating everyone started to clean everything up before leaving. I stood up and said thank you to everyone, shook some hands and left with a few people. It was a very interesting experience. Everyone was incredibly nice and hospitable. I thought it was going to be a small group so when I saw all of the people I thought I was going to be imposing but that was not the case. I hope to see Majdi again before the semester is up.

Ioana_Cultural_Immersion

I went to Chinese Church on Sunday. It is on 8801 Centerville Road. It was a very interesting experience, I met Fei at her house and we headed over to the church. The front of the church was a lot different than I am used to. I go to a Greek Orthodox Church and I am not very familiar with other denominations of Christianity. I see them as being very different. It's funny because when I was little in Romania I thought every church was like mine, even though it was called something different, they were the same. That can't be more far from the truth! If people are not familiar with the Orthodox Church, I'll give a brief summary with some pictures.

The Eastern Orthodoxy is considered as one of the old churches. When the Christian religion was just one and everyone was just "Christian", Orthodoxy existed. As Christianity grew, there were two heads, one in Rome called the western and one at Constantinople (Istanbul) which was the eastern. As they grew even more, the Great Schism happened. The west wanted a Pope and the east wanted a Patriarchate, which is among one of the issues brought up at the Ecumenical Council. After this point the two churches split and the Eastern Orthodox has kind of been on the side without many taking notice of it. Here are some pictures of services and what it looks like.

This is a lot different than what I experienced at the Chinese Church. I believe the church was protestant, even though the sign said "Chinese Church". As a side note, I drew some terrible images of what I saw because it felt rude and uncomfortable taking pictures inside where people were worshiping and speaking about churchly matters.

Moving on, we parked in a very spacious parking lot that was gravel and we walked inside the building. The hallway had a table with a lot of Chinese books and a Chinese English Bible. We found out that at 10am everyone goes to Bible study on Sundays. So we turned right after getting into the hallway and I peaked in other rooms as we were walking and saw people sitting in chairs in a circle, all were Chinese. The room we went into however, was a room with a discussion leader that was a white female with curly grey hair and glasses. The class I believe was for English speakers and those not familiar with the bible.
They were all starting to discuss the book of Revalation in class and I was handed a handout that showed the different stages of what would happen at the time of the second coming. I was also handed a book to guide me through the reading of Revalation.

I briefly flipped through the book and listened to what the speaker had to say. I was really surprised at the differences present between the way Revalation and the second coming is viewed. As an Eastern Orthodox believer, our idea is that we focus on the present not the future, therefore the book of Revalation is not heavily discussed in Sunday School and other classes. In our mind we try our best to follow in the footsteps of Christ and hopefully in the end we will be saved, only God knows the answer to that. The handout talked about rapture as being the first thing that would happen at the begining of the second coming. In my mind this is where all of the believers are taken up and given spiritual bodies. Afterwards more things occur that are mentioned on the handout seen below. As the explanation was going on, some had questions and the speaker was very animated. She mentioned that women will be looking for their babies and added "MY BABY, WHERE IS MY BABY". She had examples from nowadays which I thought were awkward things to mention, as she was mentioning things in a judging way. I also didn't realize that there would be a time where those with spiritual bodies come back and people continue to populate the earth after the second coming. I was very confused when I was looking at the handout because it was COMPLETELY different than what I am used to.
There was a bell that suddenly rang and we headed over to the actual worship room (I think that's what it is, I'm sorry I'm bad with those terms). We sat towards the front of the room and we started listening to the service that was starting. There were two people at the front, one was speaking Chinese and the other was speaking Chinese English (as Fei said) and translating what the Chinese speaker was saying. It was hard to pay attention since they were alternating.
The sermon was done by a white guy and the same translator stayed up at the podium to translate for the Chinese speakers.
The sermon was about prayer and how everyone should pray. He actually projected a power point! In my church we would never bring a projection inside the actual church. The prayer sermon was actually close to my beliefs so I wasn't very shocked, however I thought some of the picture choices were a little weird. In the sermon, the guy also talked about how he used to be Catholic and he had to do hail Mary's, at which point a lot of people laughed. I was surprised because in my church we don't criticize religions, we focus on a specific passage in the Bible and how it relates to us. That is not saying that some criticize other denominations but I think that was a little rude of him. What if there was a Catholic visitor that wanted to learn more about their religion? I would be a little put off by it if I was.
After the sermon, they had a PowerPoint of the church duties and who will start having new leadership positions. I was a bit confused at this part because the translation stopped. After this happened, visitors were called upon to introduce themselves. I didn't really want to stand up at all but Fei said I should so I did. I got up and looked back and I was shocked. There were A LOT of people, the church was filled. I gave a brief introduction and sat down again. They also mentioned that visitors get free food the first time. So we decided to stay and eat. What was weird is that there was no hall where everyone is together. Everyone just ate in different rooms so there wasn't much socializing with others at this point. During bible study I talked to someone and another lady actually gave me her card for her hair salon.
We ate the food which wasn't bad at all. Even though I noticed that I don't prefer Chinese food. I like Korean food, out of all of the Asian countries so far Korean is my favorite. Followed by Indian and Vietmamese and Japanese.
I think my experience was pretty good, I felt a little awkward and worried about speaking to everyone but it wasn't too bad. From immigrating to the United States, I don't think I will experience something as huge as that when moving to other countries. As a child, it was a very big and weird experience since I did not know much about were I was going.

Deb_TP6-8/6/2012

My Taiwanese student, Joyce, asked me to assist her with a video listening lesson that one of her teachers had downloaded for her.  We spent the next two hours dissecting the 50-minute lecture.  The lecture dealt with the theories of the causation of the Civil War in the United States.  Wow, what a journey that turned out to be!  Luckily, I am a history buff; otherwise, it would have been a very difficult lecture for her.  We went from the colonial settling of the South, to secession, onto the Missouri Compromise, some of the issues with reconstruction, and finally, the 20^th century progressive re-writing of history.  I paused the tape every 2-3 minutes to explain geography, vocabulary, the Constitution, government issues, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Ft. Sumter, etc.  After concluding the lecture with a page of notes, I looked at her and asked why her teacher had selected such a complicated lecture for her.  She said that the TOEFL asks questions about American history.  All in all, she seemed to grasp the history and the concepts that we had mapped out.  By the end of the time, she was smiling.  She felt confident that when she listened to the lecture again, she had a base of knowledge to follow the lecture as a listening exercise, instead of trying to understand the concepts, names and vocabulary.