Meeting with Dolores #1

I am kind of reluctant to tutor the same person as Omir because he has an upper hand: we are tutoring Spanish speaking individuals and he speaks Spanish. I didn't want Dolores to say that she wished he was her only tutor because he can better explain what he's talking about in Spanish, if need be. But my fears subsided after the first meeting, which I thought was productive. Also my mom is an ESL teacher at a middle school who isn't fluent in Spanish. For 7 years, she's gotten up and gone to work. I thought, too, that she's here to speak English and not Spanish.

When I first went to the downstairs of the Rec Center, there was only one white guy there, and he didn't look like he needed help with English, let alone someone named Dolores. Up the stairs and around the corner there was a program I'm in called Student Support Services (SSS) in which I get access to the computers and printers. I decided to go up there and print of my outline for speech class, which I originally planned on doing after my meeting. I didn't really have a direction in mind as to what we would do that day. I thought that we would meet, get to know eachother, and I would ask her for future references what she wanted to learn. After I went back downstairs, I sat next to the pool tables and about 5 minutes later, a man wearing a physical plant shirt was escorting a Hispanic woman in a brown blouse. I figured this was Dolores.

First, we just introduced ourselves. I told her that this was a service learning project for my English class and we are being paired up with people from the Physical Plant in order to help them with their English. I assured her that although I am fluent in English, I am by no means an expert teacher. Then she told me that she has 4 sons at home, one of whom goes to TCU. That day, the 5, 7, and 15 year olds happened to have no school, and so they were at home without her. My meeting with her began at 9 and Omir was meeting with her the same day at 11, meaning that she would have an hour gap doing nothing. I would have gladly switched my meeting time to 10, had I not had French class then. Since I didn't have Omir's number, we went to the computers at SSS and I accessed frogcalls my.tcu.edu. We couldn't get a hold of him, so she decided that day she would just have to wait. As we were walking around, I would ask her if she knew some random words we saw, such as "Recreational Center." I had to explain that "Rec Center" was short for "Recreational Center." I didn't really know how to explain what goes on there. I said something along the lines of "a building people gather where there are alot of activities going on, which is usually has something to do with sports." She kept telling me that her son told here that she's not bad at English, but she just needs to practice more. I thought this too; she just needs more confidence. In the green spiral notebook that she brought, she would ask me to write down some words that I was saying, such as "vending machines." She couldn't quite get the "V" sound out and said "Bending machines" instead. Towards the end of the meeting, I broke up in syllables the words I had written down. That helped her to pronounce them better. The next meeting, I told her I would bring a dictionary or something of that sort, that we could go over. After I finish with this blog, I'm going to look at http://www.eslcafe.com/ to see what I can find.