Vie Miller TS#11

My tutoring session with Mingu was my last of the week. Mingu is an advanced student, who came to me having already passed the TOEFL. Initially, I thought that more advanced students would be easier to teach; however, I may revise my judgement. I started off by asking Mingu to take notes on a PBS documentary. After five minutes, it was apparent that he was not engaging with the material--he was not writing anything down and had a glazed look in his eyes. I paused the television show and confirmed that he was wasn’t getting it. I asked what the problem was, and Mingu told me that the announcer’s speech was too fast and that there were too many linking words. I tried to make the best of the session by illustrating a few key idioms that the announcer had used and that, it turned out, were familiar to Mingu (a “David and Goliath” story was the key one). I then pivoted to a second activity that I had prepared: reading a few pages from the introduction of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities + comprehension questions. Jacobs is probably the most famous name in North American city planning, and I thought that the actual experience of listening to a key text would excite Mingu. But things didn’t go as planned; though I read the text at a slower than normal pace, I miscalculated the difficulty of the text. After we struggled through the first four questions, I decided to call it a day (but not before we debriefed our session). When I asked Mingu why he didn’t take notes, he replied, “I don’t like taking notes. Listening is taxing enough.” He also said that the notes form in his head in Korean, not in English, making note-taking extremely difficult. This is something that Mingu must overcome, so I will ask Professor Kim for help.