Erfaan Mahmoodi TS #10

In my ninth session with Yan, we met upstairs in the Hecht House. I returned the favor from last week’s lunch by preparing Iranian-inspired burgers for both of us. Through this, I was able to share with Yan the definition of the word “palate” in relation to “this food is made with the (insert nationality/culture) palate in mind.” Our lesson was focused on infinitives and gerunds. Yan had questions on when it is appropriate to use infinitives versus a regular verb. The way I described it to her was that infinitives are appropriate for ongoing or repeating actions: to say “he threatens leaving” indicates “he” has been continuously saying he will leave, but has not left. To say “he has left forever” indicates a single action (to leave), and this is where the regular verb is appropriate. As someone who likes teaching information visually, I also illustrated an ongoing circle (what I called an infinity) for infinitives, and a straight, directional line for a simple verb (“to go this way”). We then workshopped online exercises to tell apart gerunds or infinitives, which saw some strange usages of gerunds: “she prefers my making dinner because she doesn’t like to cook”. In explaining these, I noted with her that a gerund can have a possessive pronoun, and that while there are better ways to say such a sentence, the exercise was showing her how to properly use a gerund.