Tyrone Tuesdays

Tyrone and I go to the library together each Tuesday night to study. He's my mentee through a YMCA program. He's a high school sophomore. His grades are dropping. So we study together. Well, he does his homework and I study for my next exam. We meet at the library once each week. We spend about 90 minutes there and then we go out for dinner.

Tonight, I had him make flashcards for Spanish. We talked a good deal about his studies tonight. He's smarter than I thought he was. Of course, his education is very poor, but at least I'm learning that he's clever and I think he's enjoying the silly word and number games that I've been messing around with. I'm not doing anything ground-breaking and to most of us that came from good high schools, we would think of these drills as tedious, but they're new to Tyrone and I think he appreciates working on "adult-type" of work.

For example, tonight we conjugated words like "to go" and "to be." First in Spanish, and then in English. Sadly, he was better at the Spanish. Slowly, I'm going to break him of his "I be" and "he be" speech patterns. We thought of funny ways to remember the genders of his vocabulary. And we talked about parts of speech. And I really mean we did. It wasn't just me talking about articles. Once he had the concept, he wanted to know how articles worked in English too.

Then I started to quiz him on acronyms, and I don't know how we got there. We talked about SCUBA, HIV/AIDS, etc. I then told him that Ford stood for Fixed or Repaired Daily. He thought that was funny and then tried to come up with one for Dodge. Those are the types of word games I'm trying to encourage.

Oh, and at dinner, he almost got the tip right. At least now, he knows what percentage to give. If only I could get his math correct.