I was finally able to follow-up with Salma and have my first 2nd-meeting! We met this time at Strozier. As much as I enjoyed visiting her apartment, I found it very difficult for us to remain focused given the unlimited distractions (mainly food, pictures of her brother's wedding, and a barely-functioning A/C unit). I reserved us a study room on the third floor, and it proved to be a better educational environment on every level.
Because Salma is here in the States to work on her dissertation, I thought it would be a good idea to focus more on writing for academia (as opposed to the more personal and informal style of her writing sample). We discussed organization--I tried to make this conversational by asking her about her own organization techniques (since she has a masters and knows how to structure writing quite effectively in her own language). Her biggest obstacle at this juncture is getting all of her grand thoughts onto the paper (in English).
I then gave her a few minutes to briefly describe (in writing) her thesis work to me--in more of an outline-format, just to practice jotting down ideas. I planned on discussing this for a bit and then having her write out those thoughts into paragraphs. However, this took more time than I anticipated, and even once she was finished, we somehow got sidetracked, as she had a few vocab/usage questions over words she had read--and I made my best endeavor to help her discover the meanings of these words by asking her what the root/simpler form meant.
We ended up running out of time, and as she was pretty tired (I found out she'd only had 4 hours of sleep!), I opted out of keeping her longer. I did promise her feedback on the email she'd sent to me (it was a bit later than we'd planned, so I hadn't time to look it over properly), as well as a list of affixes (suffixes and prefixes)--since much of our lesson ended up gravitating toward that. I also didn't let her leave until we'd set up an exact time for our next meeting, since that's part of the reason we had such a gap between our first and second meetings!
This was probably the best (if not a tad elementary) improvement, other than the location change. With all the crazy schedules we have going on, setting up meeting time and place is crucial to arrange while we are present together, with our planners out.
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