Alex TP 6

On Thursday, after meeting with Mumbarek, I met with Mohammed, also outside of CIES. We also started by reviewing the assignment I’d given him the week before which was to read John Updike’s “A&P” and write 150 words of summation and 250 words analysis. It was funny because before I began to read the paper he had printed for me, I asked him if he read and what he thought. He gave me short responses so I generally thought he didn’t read it or just read a summary. Then I asked him about the girl in the story and that’s when I knew he read it. He gave this awkward sort of smile, blushed, and replied, “She was good. She got the boy into trouble though.”

Then I read over his work. His vocabulary and summary were strong; he clearly knew what happened in the story and how to express it. His weakness was his punctuation and sentence structure. He admitted he wasn’t good at distinguishing between commas and periods and it showed where he should have put a comma when he’d interrupt his thought or argument. As I read through his work I circled or underlined where he made these mistakes. When I was finished I asked him to rewrite the sentence in a way that “he thought” might sound better on a separate piece of paper. Four out of the five times he reconstructed them perfectly. I asked him if he had proofread his work before printing it. He said no that he hates doing that. I explained how instrumental it was in successfully writing just about anything and that he knew the right ways to do things and just failed to recognize it in his haste to finish the assignment.

I’m not sure whether or not he appreciated it and the gravity of proofreading but in addition to the other assignment, I asked him to ensure that his paper and Mumbarek’s would have zero mistakes and it would all rest on him. He looked at Mumbarek and not wanting to seem inferior, excitingly agreed.