Tutor training indigestion.
May. 6th, 2004 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusMind still reeling from the tutor training, I realize that I'm doing my student no favors until I have time to incorporate what I learned. The activities suggested... what activities can I do?
I've only had conversation and breaking up the class by going out to do something in the past. None of these classroom games. I'm not sure I have time to design a game.
I realize I need to do more review within the class. And I need to lay out a five week plan with specific benchmarks rather than playing it by ear and considering my tutoring to be an adjunct to the structured learning in her ESL class.
The question is: when?
This weekend there's another all-day training session (glug, glug), I found out my group for HIS 210 is meeting on Sunday, I have to re-write my first-draft essay tonight, and my India test is due Monday morning.
I have a seven-day week.
Interesting observation: my student is worried about her son picking up a mix of Chinese and English. Talk about transculturation. He uses the English word for car with the Mandarin word for go.
She gave me several examples, and I realized there was no problem. The nouns were all English while the verbs were all Mandarin. He was just learning the English nouns first. I explained that nouns were easier. A book is always a book, whether it's on the table or you drop it on the floor. But verbs have tenses and sound like several words when you're little and first learning.
We talked a bit about family names and how in China a woman doesn't take her husband's last name (though the children will usually have their father's last name). This has caused some confusion over here. People see her last name is different from her husband's and wonder what's going on.
Since the class over the weekend talked about the importance of learning culture as well as language, I went on for a bit (worrying the whole time that her hour was slipping away).
I explained that in the US, people see the two different last names and are assuming either a) she and her husband are not married but have a son (happens sometimes); or b) she's a very strong woman into women's equal rights to men, who refuses to change her last name to her husband's.
My student thought that was the zaniest thing, that your name would change once you get married. After all you're the same person. I told her it's even worse than that. When women get divorced, then remarried, their names can change several times. It's very confusing. My mom's had four legal name changes. Then with divorce, the kids end up with different last names from both their mom and their stepfather, and they have to explain why all the time. (That happened to me.) So then sometimes people hyphenate the last names to try to make it clear.
My student was pretty keen on that hyphenating idea (it would work with nice short Chinese names, too, and might clear up the confusion over her son having a different last name from his mom): "You can do that?"
She explained that her sister-in-law has done something unusual in that she's given her younger kids her last name, while the older ones have their father's last name. Sort of an equal rights thing. My student was very amused, though apparently it was rather radical and confusing for people.
She joked that she talked it over with her husband, to see if they could do the same, but he shot the idea down. And she laughed.
I've only had conversation and breaking up the class by going out to do something in the past. None of these classroom games. I'm not sure I have time to design a game.
I realize I need to do more review within the class. And I need to lay out a five week plan with specific benchmarks rather than playing it by ear and considering my tutoring to be an adjunct to the structured learning in her ESL class.
The question is: when?
This weekend there's another all-day training session (glug, glug), I found out my group for HIS 210 is meeting on Sunday, I have to re-write my first-draft essay tonight, and my India test is due Monday morning.
I have a seven-day week.
Interesting observation: my student is worried about her son picking up a mix of Chinese and English. Talk about transculturation. He uses the English word for car with the Mandarin word for go.
She gave me several examples, and I realized there was no problem. The nouns were all English while the verbs were all Mandarin. He was just learning the English nouns first. I explained that nouns were easier. A book is always a book, whether it's on the table or you drop it on the floor. But verbs have tenses and sound like several words when you're little and first learning.
We talked a bit about family names and how in China a woman doesn't take her husband's last name (though the children will usually have their father's last name). This has caused some confusion over here. People see her last name is different from her husband's and wonder what's going on.
Since the class over the weekend talked about the importance of learning culture as well as language, I went on for a bit (worrying the whole time that her hour was slipping away).
I explained that in the US, people see the two different last names and are assuming either a) she and her husband are not married but have a son (happens sometimes); or b) she's a very strong woman into women's equal rights to men, who refuses to change her last name to her husband's.
My student thought that was the zaniest thing, that your name would change once you get married. After all you're the same person. I told her it's even worse than that. When women get divorced, then remarried, their names can change several times. It's very confusing. My mom's had four legal name changes. Then with divorce, the kids end up with different last names from both their mom and their stepfather, and they have to explain why all the time. (That happened to me.) So then sometimes people hyphenate the last names to try to make it clear.
My student was pretty keen on that hyphenating idea (it would work with nice short Chinese names, too, and might clear up the confusion over her son having a different last name from his mom): "You can do that?"
She explained that her sister-in-law has done something unusual in that she's given her younger kids her last name, while the older ones have their father's last name. Sort of an equal rights thing. My student was very amused, though apparently it was rather radical and confusing for people.
She joked that she talked it over with her husband, to see if they could do the same, but he shot the idea down. And she laughed.
