Evan TS#12 (Bruce)

    I arrived again to working with Bruce and tenses. This time we tackled example sentences from his class. They (the students) were asked to to describe a film they had seen previously, requiring the past tense. Some sentences were easy fixes such as replacing "is" with "are". One sentence, "Mr. Bean saw a child jump on the slide" more complicated. For one, the teacher corrected the student, and replaced "jump" with "jumping". I was not sure which was correct, because the latter could have been more formal. I just did not know. It also could denote different actions, or a different temporal meaning. I just had no clue. Either way we worked with the teacher's example. Anything beyond the simple variants of the tenses caused some confusion, both in explanation and his understanding. We ended the lesson by trying to make some example sentences. I made a sentence and he gave me the tense. In hindsight, this should have been reversed, I should have given him a tense, and asked for a sentence that made sense. Regardless, we can work on it next time.

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