Gale_TP#12

Gale Workman

TP#12

Sept. 18, 2014, 11:50 a.m.

Hecht House

Midterms took their toll on students this week. Jiwanwei and Wiwik arrived promptly for our brown bag tutoring session, but stress and fatigue was in their faces and body postures. We chatted casually about the stress awhile as we tucked into our lunch kits.

Also, as usual, we discussed what we brought for lunch and how the food was prepared. Each session, these students ask questions about food and cooking vocabulary. New food at the table this week was “eggplant.” Everybody eats, so food is high-frequency vocabulary.

Wiwik told us she had just given a “how-to” presentation about math in a CIES class. Wiwik hopes to enroll in a master’s program in math education. I asked her to tell us about how she uses 10 fingers to teach children how to multiply. She demonstrated and I was amazed. Nobody ever taught me this simple trick!

I’m not sure how it started, but a lesson about dependent clauses took up the remainder of the session. Jianwei and Wiwik are in the same Composition class, so I think they must have recently reviewed dependent clauses in class. They both struggled with how to use them in a sentence.

At one point, we wandered into the who-whom/nominative-objective case rules. This seemed to be new territory for both students, and the stress and fatigue returned to their faces, so we decided to save who-whom for another day.