(no subject)
After my long absence, I come to you with more tales of tutoring.
On Wednesday, I was working in the ESL lab. One of the students was on the part of her paper where we discuss grammar. Note, I am a tutor, not a proofreader, so I don't actually get to tell people how to fix their grammar. Instead, I get to use a variety of teaching tools that hopefully only occasionally make the student feel like I am purposely withholding my grammatical wisdom by making them guess. They have, thus far, been remarkably restrained in not beating me about the head and shoulders with a keyboard for my obstinacy. However, this particular student might have been perfectly justified if she had decided to smack me a few times.
I should also add that I had one of our new(er) tutors shadowing me at this time, as part of his training. I have notoriously bad luck when it comes to conferencing with students while others watch. I have no idea why, since I'm not exactly shy and I do perfectly fine the rest of the time. The time when a student stood up, demanded a new tutor, and complained about my insensitivity to my supervisor? I had a student shadowing me.
So, we're trucking along, and doing pretty well. The student didn't click as well with my normal method of tutoring grammar (modeling the issue by creating a sentence with a similar grammatical problem) as well as some of the student I worked with, but I tried a few other methods and we were managing. Then we came to the following sentence:
"My family is not educated and hard to find work."
I squinted at it for a bit, and created the following sentence as a model:
"I am clumsy and hard to walk."
To the native speaker, it's going to be pretty obvious that both sentences are missing the words "it is" after the word "and." Not so to an ESL student, because a)her native language probably does not contain this kind of structure, and b) English is a stupid, stupid language. No, really. I tried a few different ways of explaining it, to no avail. Take a moment, and try to explain what the word "it" refers to in sentences like, "it is raining." You'll see what I mean. I promised to ask my boss about it and come back to her with an explanation next class.
My boss' response? "Oh, it's idiomatic. There's absolutely no way to explain it in such a way that it makes sense."
As the head of the ESL lab is fond of saying, notice how very close the word "idiomatic" is the the word "idiotic."
On the bright side, modeling works so very well, and sticks in the mind to such a great extent that the trainee tutor has taken to chuckling and saying "I am clumsy and hard to walk" every time he sees me.
On Wednesday, I was working in the ESL lab. One of the students was on the part of her paper where we discuss grammar. Note, I am a tutor, not a proofreader, so I don't actually get to tell people how to fix their grammar. Instead, I get to use a variety of teaching tools that hopefully only occasionally make the student feel like I am purposely withholding my grammatical wisdom by making them guess. They have, thus far, been remarkably restrained in not beating me about the head and shoulders with a keyboard for my obstinacy. However, this particular student might have been perfectly justified if she had decided to smack me a few times.
I should also add that I had one of our new(er) tutors shadowing me at this time, as part of his training. I have notoriously bad luck when it comes to conferencing with students while others watch. I have no idea why, since I'm not exactly shy and I do perfectly fine the rest of the time. The time when a student stood up, demanded a new tutor, and complained about my insensitivity to my supervisor? I had a student shadowing me.
So, we're trucking along, and doing pretty well. The student didn't click as well with my normal method of tutoring grammar (modeling the issue by creating a sentence with a similar grammatical problem) as well as some of the student I worked with, but I tried a few other methods and we were managing. Then we came to the following sentence:
"My family is not educated and hard to find work."
I squinted at it for a bit, and created the following sentence as a model:
"I am clumsy and hard to walk."
To the native speaker, it's going to be pretty obvious that both sentences are missing the words "it is" after the word "and." Not so to an ESL student, because a)her native language probably does not contain this kind of structure, and b) English is a stupid, stupid language. No, really. I tried a few different ways of explaining it, to no avail. Take a moment, and try to explain what the word "it" refers to in sentences like, "it is raining." You'll see what I mean. I promised to ask my boss about it and come back to her with an explanation next class.
My boss' response? "Oh, it's idiomatic. There's absolutely no way to explain it in such a way that it makes sense."
As the head of the ESL lab is fond of saying, notice how very close the word "idiomatic" is the the word "idiotic."
On the bright side, modeling works so very well, and sticks in the mind to such a great extent that the trainee tutor has taken to chuckling and saying "I am clumsy and hard to walk" every time he sees me.