Last night I did my second tutoring session at the NALC. I did a two hour session, and it was absolutely incredible. While at first I was skeptical of having to do work outside of class, I have fallen in love with tutoring at the literacy center. Last night, my first student was Rogoberta. Coming all the way from Guatemala, Rogoberta was a sweet woman who came in about 20 minutes late, full of apologies, and smiling from ear to ear. Having seen some of her favorite hobbies were praying and reading her bible, I knew we would have an immediate connection. It was great to have the time before she came to look over both lesson plans and really learn about who my students were. Because of this, I was able to incorporate their interests into our lesson. For example, when talking about the meaning of the word "mean", I could reference King Herod as a "mean" person because he wanted to kill baby Jesus. It was fun to be able to remodel to the lesson to incorporate topics and words that were interesting to her. I really enjoyed talking with her during our chit-chat time before class and hearing about her life and her faith. We both enjoyed looking through her Spanish-English bible and reading different verses that we found encouraging and interesting. She had a pretty good command of the language, but was focusing on learning how to pronounce things and the meaning of certain words. It was also cool because I know a little bit of Spanish, and was able to use that in our conversation and in our lession to help her understand things better. At one point I asked her what her name meant in Spanish, and she asked me what the word "mean" meant. It was definitely the hardest word to explain, becuase it is one of those words you never know how to define without using the word in your definition!!
My second student was a sweet Asian woman from Taiwan named Nina. She is in the U.S. to study methods and technology of cochlear implants. Because they have standardized healthcare in Taiwan, most people's insurance do not cover them for this surgery, so it is not as prevalent as it is in the U.S. She has come here to do a fellowship at Vanderbilt and research more about this surgery, so she can go back to Taiwan, where she is a doctor, and bring the knowledge and techniques back to her patients. She was really sweet and very eager to learn. In our lesson, we focused mostly on cultural things such as families, terms for extended families, and American culture. She had a good grasp of the different terms used for families, so we spent a lot of class discussing the questions that were provided in the textbook about her familiy, so I was able to learn a lot about her and her family background which was very interesting. She also told me more about life and culture in Taiwan, and even gave me suggestions of good places to go for Korean BBQ here in Nashville. I really enjoyed working with her and have schedule to tutor her again next week!
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