David_CP#3 Yousef

I met with Yousef outside of the Epps building, and we just walked around. He had some trouble remembering names of buildings, so I made a list of the most important ones for him to remember. This conversation quickly turned into a mini tutoring session about directions, and the proper way to ask for them.  He already knew the classroom way of asking and could get by, but he wanted to work on his conversational aspect of asking. He wanted to sound informal. He is quickly picking up on the fact that people in passing, and even more so on a campus, that there are lots of informal conversations between people that don’t know each other, and probably never will. We talked about that for a while, and even use a few unsuspecting passer bys as test subjects, and he became much more comfortable. This really took a majority of the time we had, but during this tutoring, we talked a lot about how America differs from many other places in the words when it comes to passing people on the street that you don’t know. At one point, we walked by someone, and we (Myself and the other person) nodded to each other. Yousef assumed that we knew each other, but I explain to him that a lot of the times, it is normal to acknowledge someone; especially if you have to step around each other or it’s a narrow sidewalk or something like that… it is not seen as odd. I talked about my time in Russia, that if I did that there, people would think I was crazy. In Russian culture, someone who smiles all the time (on the street to strangers) is looked on as “Loose in the head.” I think it was a very good time talking about these things, and I think he gained something out of it.