Jules TP-4

I met again with Jae this Saturday to do a more in-depth tutoring session. She had expressed a desire to improve her listening and speaking skills, so I found an interesting TED Talk to listen to and quiz her on. Before we even got to our tutoring location, however, Jae got herself into a little predicament so before beginning the lesson we had to figure out how to rectify the issue...

On Friday, a couple of days after I'd met Jae, she had texted me to see if I had any recommendations on where to take someone for birthday dinner. I suggested Monk's Bar and Grill, and then she presented me with an array of questions... "What type of food is it? What is the price range? How long does it take to get there?" and so on. I happily provided her with prompt responses, and didn't think too much of it. Well, when I picked her up on Saturday for our tutoring session, she was on the phone with her aunt. As soon as she got in the car she put the phone down and I asked her what she'd thought about Monk's. She told me that she hadn't actually gone to Monk's; her friend had had a birthday party the night and she'd been out until 2 a.m. Jae had lied to her aunt and told her they went to dinner at Monk's because her aunt and uncle would not have let her go to a party. Little did she know that she had not successfully hung up the phone and we determined that her aunt had probably heard the whole story. She was really scared about being in trouble so we developed a tactful explanation to give to her aunt. Basically, we decided she should talk about how birthday parties are a very common celebration in America, and are important for her integration into this culture. Jae was really nervous about having this discussion, so she was eager to do some listening exercises to take her mind off the subject.

We watched a TED Talk on being a "weekday vegetarian", and I wrote down some vocabulary that may have posed problems for her. It was just a four minute long presentation, so we were able make it into an intensive listening exercise. After the initial listening, I asked her what she thought a weekday vegetarian was. She answered successfully, and we replayed the video with the subtitles on. Every time the speaker would say a new or difficult word, I would pause the video and get her to hypothesize what it meant before explaining it to her. One of the words that came up was "hypocritically". I told her about all the various forms of the word: hypocrisy, hypocrite, hypocritical, and hypocritically. She wanted to know if she was being a hypocrite by telling her aunt that she was going to dinner instead of a party. I clarified that it is not really hypocritical to lie, unless one goes around pointing fingers at others and telling them not to lie. Another vocab word that came up was "stalling". Jae had suggested that she didn't want to come clean with her aunt, and I thought she was delaying the inevitable, or stalling! It was interesting that these two topics should arise, considering the situation Jae found herself in!