Bobby - TP_CIES 1

My first meeting with my CIES tutee went really well! I was supposed to be with three students: Bruno, Carla, and Naser, but only Bruno showed up today. We spent the majority of our time just talking, as speaking is what he feels he needs to work on the most. His English is excellent...I actually can't believe he's only level 2. We talked about a number of things: his background in electrical engineering (he knows very complex terms like "systems propagation" and could talk at length about the Mag Lab at FSU), how bars and club in Tallahassee are different from those in his native Brazil, and what he wants to do beyond the CIES program. It turns out he wants to continue his engineering education at FSU if (when) he passes the TOEFL. As an FSU alumnus and current student, I obviously encouraged this aspiration!

Along with introductions and talking about many things, I also helped him correct one of his assignments for class. It had already been graded by his instructor, but she hadn't made any corrections on his paper. In this assignment, Bruno's classmates had previously explained about an aspect of their home country (how to make a certain dish, how to hold chopsticks, etc.) and the students were supposed to write down what they remembered about each presentation. I have to say he did a very good job. The mistakes I saw were very minor. I corrected these and explained why they were wrong. I changed "meet" to "meat", "some stuffs" to "a few things", and I also explained the names for the different fingers. I traced my own hand on his paper and wrote in their names on each finger. He is very smart, so he picked up on all of these changes quickly.

Next week, we agreed to meet earlier in hopes that this will be a better time for the other two students. We decided that we would work on material to prepare for the TOEFL, along with any weekly assignments he might need help on. Overall, this first meeting was a lot of fun, and I am looking forward to future tutoring sessions with the CIES students!