Evan- TS#10 (Bruce)

     Our next meeting would not be for quite some time, close to three weeks. This was due, mostly, to my poor planning. Around our last meeting I was a little swamped with midterms in my college courses and the final for this class. I was on good track to meet my goal for sessions, so I requested some time to work on schooling, meaning we did not meet for one Monday, and that following Wednesday, I did not find him at the CIES. Still having work to do, I thought nothing of it and continued to focus on classes. That Friday I fall ill, enough to the point where I take a COVID test, thankfully coming up negative. Not wanting to put my tutee at risk (and also not feeling up to snuff) I took the week off from tutoring. After messaging him on the following Sunday, Bruce responds on Tuesday saying he is free that Thursday. Nearly three weeks later, Bruce and I finally meet again to resume our tutoring.

 

    With that massive and likely unnecessary story out of the way, I had no clue where Bruce was following our hiatus. I knew he still wanted to work on Grammar and demonstrated that he was still behind in classes there, making it clear that was his weakest point. This was not new to me, and I was ready to once again tackle some of his problems with him. We spent a majority of the day going over example sentences from in class. The students had been asked to provide a question to their peers and record their responses. The class then took time together to go over the collaborative responses.  What became apparent going over the sentences, Bruce struggled a lot with tenses and syntax. He did not know how to do negatives properly and was unsure why certain tenses were used, especially once the students began to use more complex sentences. One thing we (I) struggled with a lot, was the continuous tense, especially in the past. This difficulty stems from the fact that I cannot articulate well how exactly these tenses are functioning. The intricacies of verb tenses describes and informs virtually all of the temporal elements of a sentence. This makes it incredibly difficult to describe that temporal nature without overusing the tense and confusing the learner. I think this is most definitely a problem unique to me, as I have become accustomed to proficiency in my audience. I take for granted the ability of my listener to understand me. Therefore, it makes it difficult to describe things, as I rely on synonym and metonymy to represent ideas and actions. This makes it difficult because these rhetorical strategies are often intrinsically understood by the native listener, but this is not the case for the learner. I have to become accustomed to simplifying my explanations. This requires a more coherent understanding of English which I can only assume comes from time and experience.

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