In this session, I had the initial meeting with my 7th grade tutee, Woo-joo Shin. I greeted his mother at the doorway into the home and met him in the kitchen. They moved from South Korea three years ago and he was surprising fluent for his brief time in the states.
Before transitioning into the tutoring portion, the three of us discussed the goals we wanted to achieve. While Woo-joo could speak and listen well, he expressed concern with his reading and writing skills, which his mother concurred with. I made mental notes for my preparation of future sessions.
I made the point in telling Woo-joo to prepare appropriate material for future sessions. I also told him that I wasn't there to give him the homework answers. As long as the content aligned with ESL-related goals, then I was game. For this lesson, we worked on word stems. On his worksheet, he had to match the stem with its definition and write three words that contain the prefix. Even though he protested at first, I also instructed him to draw his own interpretation of the word stem. This visual aid would help in engraving the material in his memory.
On a side note, Woo-joo and I shared in a particularly humorous moment. One stem on the worksheet was "psycho", which was defined as "miserable". While brainstorming words, I thought of "psychopath", a term that he didn't recognize. I explained it as someone who makes other feel miserable. He pondered that for a moment before saying "so... does that mean my mother?" I laughed rather loudly, to say the least.
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