October 16th

Tutor time, again. This time though there was no rain, a-score for Mary. Actually I arrived in the neighborhood thirty minutes early, which seems pretty wigged but better to be early rather than late. Besides I had my I-pod on me, 311 makes the time just slip by. Once it was finally 5:30 I rang the doorbell and was greeted by little Alexis. After saying a big, "hello Mary," he lead me to the breakfast room where Louis was waiting for me. Oh Louis, you silly twelve and a half year old. I tend to forget that at that age kids still think that the main adults in their life are always right. Well Louis they aren't, especially when it comes to English prepositions. This week was English irregular verb review, which went fine, followed by me checking over his homework. This is where to dispute of whether I was right or not occurred. One of his sentences, more so questions, read, "what are you doing at the weekend?" Hmm now what's the issue here? Oh wrong preposition kiddo. I told Louis that the word should be "over" rather than "at"; Louis didn't take too well to this correction. "My professor wrote that." Alright Louis. I almost said, but contained, "so?" I then told him that even though his professor is probably fluent in English he can make mistakes especially with prepositions. Nope, no sale. "My professor wrote it." Uh huh. Well it's wrong it should be over. I ended my argument by telling Louis that he should tell his professor that the "correct preposition" was "over", and that an American had told him. He had trouble processing this. I could tell that even though he is twelve, Louis wasn't able to understand that his teacher is human and that he is wrong sometimes. Oh well. Shortly after, Anne appeared and Louis left. Alright, time for round two. Anne, being older, is easier to work with when it comes to corrections. This week her English assignment was to take an article from a British paper and write a short speech about it. Ok no problem. The article was about rhino poaching in Africa, riveting. She then showed me her step-by-step format for the speech. Everything was going great until we hit a vocabulary snag. Written on her paper was "tub". Huh? What does a tub have to do with newspaper articles? I asked her what the word was, just in case it was French, and she responded, "oh toob." No honey, "toob" is spelled "t-u-b-e", this says "t-u-b". I was even more confused at the context in which it was used. Literally the string of words said, "attractive tub." Wow just wow. The two of us eventually just gave up. I proposed that it could be "tabs" as in the small column articles of the newspaper, but Anne said that she'd rather just ask her friend what it meant. Ah, there's the issue. Apparently Anne did not copy this directly from the board but rather a classmate's notes. One would think that in a country where chicken scratch cursive is the standard penmanship style that the students would know that copying English notes from another student with the French handwriting would just be kamikaze! This is another reason why the system of e-mails is fantastic; no one can misinterpret ariel or times new roman font. When it was time to leave everyone said goodbye to me, Louis had to be coaxed by his mother, and I walked into the sunshine. The walk home was enjoyable, I talked with my brother for a little while on the phone, before arriving at the dorm. Home sweet half-finished home.