I made a 'beautiful' mistake with this lesson. I thought that it might be a good idea to combine Jason's father's lessons through Adult Community Education (ACE) with Jason's lesson. My thinking was that since I could much more easily identify deficiencies in Jongkwon's, the father's, command of the language than Jason's, the three of us could learn together. What I didn't account for was the degree to which Jongkwon was weak, especially relative to the complexity of the topic.
Jongkwon was studying specific meanings of the following phrasal verbs: build up, adds up to, bring out, brush off, blow up, bring up, be up to, and build on. These were so hard for Jongkwon to understand that I could not bring Jason into the study. In the end, Jason fell out of the study entirely and the lesson was exclusively focused on Jongkwon.
I did learn a small lesson about Jason's view of English. When I tried to explain to Jongkwon the 'explosive anger' meaning of 'blow up', Jason tried to explain it to his father by miming the blowing up of a balloon. I had the sense that Jason has a slightly rigid view of the meanings of words, something like a one-to-one correspondence between the words in two languages. Perhaps this should be expected of a 9-year-old, but it is very useful information for understanding Jason's mindset in future lessons.
This was a 'live and learn' lesson.
I enjoyed reading your journal, Tom! Jong-kwon and Jason have VERY different strengths and weaknesses, and I know it's extremely difficult to teach them together. =)
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