Logan_TP#16

J Logan Matthews

TP#16
Oct 17, 2014 (5:30PM-6:30PM)
Tutee's Residence

This was the final tutoring session with Claire. She began reading a book about a girl and her turtle. This time I didn't feel the need to slow down as much for some of the bigger words since the drill was largely established. After being told about India and China in terms of animals or bamboo, the turtle mistook being out of his pen for being in those countries. So the theme of the book was on perspective so I tried to use some examples to explain that to her like being too short to see over the fridge, being lost in the woods, or living in one region your whole life. 

We proceeded onto the contractions section of the workbook. She already understood the concept pretty well but her spelling was off. I encouraged her to look at the start of the two words to match it to the word bank and then proceed into writing it out. While wrapping up the activity I introduced the use of possessives and some exceptions in English like, "It's versus its" and "student's versus students'." 

I was impressed with how she had improved either technically or motivation-ally as we had plenty of time afterwards to do the picture dice game again. We did two rounds where I wrote out the story as she told me but made grammatical changes for clarity. I was a little more picky with word choice this time since she was already familiarized with the game such as how a particular noun could be tied to the verb like how an arrow makes a hole in the roof. I made suggestions to correct a sentence to make logical sense as well as using the proper tense or form of a word like "fired" versus "burned."

When our time was up I talked to Jihei some more about my application process in South Korea, that day I had interviewed with a recruiter that specialized in the Jeollanamdo province but as of now, I know I wasn't accepted. Since we had already established that they were returning to Seoul and I was talking about regions, she told me how many South Koreans have a long commute from the jibang to their work in Seoul where a 4 hour commute was not unheard of. Judging from the language in the ads (many request female education/English majors with airfare paid up-front), I think many of the positions may have filled up with the rise in TEFL popularity over the post-recession years. If it is too much trouble to start in South Korea now, I will try starting in China, Thailand, or Vietnam for my first year of teaching experience. Fortunately, Jihei has offered to write a letter of recommendation that may come in handy.