Erfaan Mahmoodi TS #11

My tenth session with Yan is our earliest yet: an 8:10 start before her 9:00 class. We followed timed reading exercises where Yan would read two pages of text for an unlimited amount of time (ideally 5-7 minutes). I had a few books on my person, and gave her two of them to do readings from: one was The Uninhabitable Earth and the other was Homage to Catalonia. The former book was a unique challenge, as it used scientific language figuratively. That made it all the more exciting to, in post-reading comprehension discussions, see Yan make sense of the metaphors present in the passages read. She made connections between the words “emit” and “exhale”, and saw how the latter word, for breathing out, was used to talk about something industrial. For any new vocabulary that confused her, which was numerous given the nature of the book, I wrote flashcards for her that gave the spelling of the word, different forms of the word (if it was a verb), and its definition. The Homage to Catalonia reading was less exciting for her, and I realized that the passage lacked sufficient context to be understood: she mistook a comparison of a thin candle to one on a Christmas cake as being a simile. The way in which she connected with the climate-change material of Uninhabitable Earth was exciting, and showed a significant mark in the growth of her reading and comprehension skills.