Evan TS #11 (Bruce)

  This meeting with Bruce, we covered tenses in more rigorous detail. Again this falls under my inability to recognize my tutee's weaker areas. He was unsure what he was tasked with so we dove into covering them from the beginning with the simple tenses. He understood these quite clearly, but struggled to know which one to use on the fly. He was able to recognize the forms, but struggled at using them. I think I should work less on the theoretical side with Bruce, and focus more on him actually using the tenses. I should ask him to write sentences in a given tense, rather than explain where to use them. One other difficulty, is one cannot often assume what exactly a speaker is trying to convey, and tenses inform a lot in a sentence. I don't know which tense he wants to use, right? I can't read his mind and know the ideas he is trying to convey until he actually conveys them. Bit of a conundrum. Either way, working more closely with productive activities would likely help simulate this area better. We made our way into the continuous tenses, and I struggled a lot with explaining these. I just do not know when we use a given tense, just that it makes sense when we do use that tense. I also don't really consider tense, or word choice. These lessons make me really self conscious about the language. He understood past continuous, having something be interrupted. But the more complex ones, like perfect continuous I failed at. We decided to reconvene and take another crack at it later that week.

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