Suelli Meeting 3

            With spring break and two busy schedules, it has been a couple of weeks since Suelli and I have been able to meet.  It never fails that we will only be free on the days that the other has something to do.  I also found out that Suelli has two conversation partners.  She was originally paired with another girl, but her schedule with school and work was too packed to meet with Suelli consistently.  Now that the semester is coming to an end, she has more free time and is able to meet with her, so Suelli is trying to keep up meetings with the both of us.  This and my new job are making it a little more difficult to find a time to meet, but we are trying. 

            Our third meeting was a lot easier to find things to talk about and she seemed much more comfortable with her English speaking abilities.  She doesn’t have very much of the IEP program to finish so she seems more confident.  I found out that she is going to transfer to Richland College in Dallas to finish up her English so that she can begin studying microbiology.  This lead to a conversation about looking for apartments and all of the responsibilities that came along with it.  I explained that my parents said I needed to get a job before they would agree to let me move down here for the summer.  Suelli seemed kind of surprised and said that she finds it interesting how many people start to work at pretty young ages in the United States.  She said that it made her begin to think of people in her country, Angola, as lazy because they put off working as long as they can.  This really surprised me and it was something I hadn’t thought of before.  Since this is my first job other than working for my parents company occasionally in high school, I considered myself lucky for not having to really work until now and hadn’t thought of it as being young at all.  She also explained to me that because she is here on a student visa she isn’t able work.  I didn’t think about this but it made me realize how big of a financial commitment it would be for parents of international students because the students themselves can’t have a job to contribute. 

            The conversation then inevitably landed on summer plans and the excitement and stress of the semester coming to an end.  Suelli said that she had a lot of homework left before the end of the program including two papers, which she was dreading the most.  The most difficult part for her is grammar and spelling errors that I think are actually quite common.  One of the examples she brought up was the words that have different spellings for the different meanings including words like ‘there, their, they’re’ and ‘your, you’re’.  I thought that this was kind of funny, not because she thinks it’s difficult but because many native English speakers make these mistakes all of the time.  Even though English is their first language, they often do not know the difference or care enough to use the correct one.  So, Suelli, who is relatively new to English, seems more concerned with making the errors and therefore, probably does better with it than most of us.  Because of my meetings with her I will probably think a little more about how much slang I use when I speak and be on the watch for grammatical errors more than I have before.  I’m realizing that I take English for granted and just assume I know what there is to know because it is my first language without making sure I practice it correctly.  I have started to notice a little bit of a change already and I really do think that I will be able to take something away from this experience.