We’re starting off the week with a Work from Home Student Feature! Grace Ingle is one of our Spanish Assistants, majoring in Russian and Middle Eastern Studies with a minor in Arabic. She’s been tutoring students from home, and here’s what she shared with us about the experience!
Two of my peers and I are working with the Russian Department to instruct 20-minute conversations classes weekly for each student in Intermediate Russian. I speak with 3 students a week, and we have a different assigned topic each week. We use FaceTime for these sessions, plus a text or visual aid from Moodle as a starting point.
I am also continuing to tutor students I had worked with in person while on campus. I work with one to two students weekly from the Dickinson Russian Department, but I also tutor a high school student from the Carlisle area. I combine Google Docs and FaceTime for these sessions so that we can write, read and translate activities in live time while also being virtually face-to-face and speaking in Russian.
With the high school student I tutor, we are using the ballets live streamed by Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater as a reference point for lessons now. For example, I used the video of Sleeping Beauty on YouTube as a reference point for new vocabulary and ideas. I pulled text from the video description and bolded words that we had already covered to see if the student could infer the meaning of the text. I also found an online text of Sleeping Beauty online in Russian for ideas about additional relevant vocabulary to telling the story. I used all of the words from these sources to create translation and grammar exercises. It was a lot of fun!
I am also on deck as an Arabic tutor at the Multilingual Writing Center. I haven’t had any appointments yet, but yesterday one of my classmates helped me as a writing tutor to edit my thesis. We worked through SharePoint to see edits in live time while also being on a video call, which can be done through the MWC scheduling system. It was still equally productive as it would have been in person, I think!
