Evan- TS#8 (Bruce)

     Our session started with a bit of a surprise. Bruce informed me on Monday that the coming Wednesday he was going to have a quiz on clauses. Being that grammar was his weakest area he wanted to get a good grade on this quiz, so he could move up following the end of the term. This caused a small amount of panic, as we scheduled to meet Mondays and Wednesdays, meaning we would only meet once before his quiz. I suppose my emotional attachment to his success is inevitable, but still I should be more able to separate and distinguish myself (and my abilities as a tutor) from my students' success. Regardless, we made an impromptu schedule change, and decided to meet again on Tuesday before the quiz to review one final time. We got to work on noun clauses again, hammering out the few issues he had remaining with the material. I set to work on distinguishing the differences between indirect and direct objects, as this seemed to confuse him. The concept of an object is actually really easy to describe to a learner, and they often take to it quickly. What is actually difficult is describing the lengths to which the object plays a role in grammar and pronoun choice. A lot of verbs have objects that one might not think they do. Like "know" for example. The flip side is that the last choice is easy to determine, so long as one can identify a clause when they see it. As an object of a preposition requires knowledge of prepositions, thus one can find a clause and know its function simply by identifying the preposition, something Bruce did not struggle with. We had a brief review of adjective clauses, and by brief I mean 5 minutes, as we had already gone over time by this point.

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