Jessica TP1

After the change of plans in the tutoring list on Thursday, I was waiting to see who Ramin would pair me up with when I ran into Alonso, a good friend of my conversation partner, Cloris. We started chatting and he asked if I knew what was going on with the tutor situation that he hadn't found out who would tutor him yet, and I said I wasn't sure, but that I was trying to find out who to tutor, so we came to the simple conlusion that we'd partner up!
We hung out in a class room and I started asking him how long he'd been in Tallahassee for (almost 2 weeks) and how he'd been doing in the CIES classes. He admitted that he was a little bit lost, that he has not really studied English before. The conversation was a mix of English and Spanish, I'd say something in English and clarify what he didn't understand in Spanish. I'm really excited to work with him from the very basic level because he's not at all afraid to dive into the language and make beautiful mistakes. He mentioned that he's not shy about using English and would make a great effort to push himself to speak it whenever possible. It's really inspiring to see such motivation, which led me to ask why he wanted to learn english his answer was a great surprise...to be able to come to the U.S. and work as a helicopter pilot. He lives in Panama and works flying helicopters doing crop dusting and other things, it sounds like such an exciting job! I was thrilled to learn he has an interest in flying, because I do as well. My dad works out at the private side of the airport here in Tallahassee overseeing maintenance of smaller planes and has his pilots license. (I took lessons for a time, but got too busy with school to finish.)  I told Alonso we'd have to go to the airport to do a lesson some time on flight vocabulary and he lit up! He told me that it's much easier for him to speak English when he gets excited over something; the example he used was talking about a motorcycle at a party he recently went to. It makes perfect sense, if you're into a subject you'll try harder to learn/understand it in the language you're learning. I can definitely see that we will work well together and I cannot wait to help him out with learning about flight (and everything else) in English!