It sounded a bit weird at first, but I’m kinda getting used to it, though I still do not believe I accepted tutoring my little cousin. Not that I was given a choice; my mom and aunt practically forced it onto me, making all the decisions without considering the concerned person here, i.e. me. The reason for my reluctance had more to do with my cousin than with the tutoring. It had always been mutual dislike between us; maybe it had to do with the age difference. An 8-years gap can be quite a lot for 2 kids living under the same roof, especially when both are only child to their parents. Anyway, it seems that the “dislike” has completely disappeared for now and for good, I’m hoping; these past years I had been so busy with school and other stuffs that I barely gave any attention to the persons living in my house.

Back to the tutoring… I’m helping her with her Urdu, preparing her for her exams in November which is quite far really, but she really needs it. On a side note, I’m starting to think my mom decided on this for me to deal with the language craze I was – am still having, though it has been reduced to only words rather than full sentences. Originally, it had been decided that she would go to my old tutor, but somehow it turned onto me, with my mom saying why go look for others when they already had a “qualified” (which I don’t really consider myself to be) person in the house. And so it was decided I would take the “job”, working with my cousin for an hour or so each Saturdays.

Today was the second lesson, which went out quite well. Last week, I tried to see on what level she was so that I could prepare an adequate working project for her. From her copybooks at school, I’ve seen a lot of grammatical or spelling mistakes which is quite normal for a someone of her age, but what disturbed me was that her teacher didn’t even see those mistakes and just told her that her work was good. Her teacher didn’t even take the time to explain anything to her, all she does is give the students some work and she is free for the whole teaching session.

I’m still working on grammars and vocabulary with my cousin, though at school she is already working on comprehensions and essays. I’m still hesitating to do that because I want to be sure she is capable of understanding and expressing herself fully before going on the the next level. While she can understand most of the words, she still is having problems with structures of sentences and verbs (everyone’s weakness at the beginning, I guess xD). I told her we are going to work on a small passage next week, just to see how she does, but essays are definitely off limits, for now. Maybe in a month or so.

That was well, a … brief overview of my tutoring If any of you have some ideas on what approach to take, please do share it with me ^.^

Tags: family, tutoring