A week in the life of a Flowently tutor

The sessions

Have you ever asked yourself what your Flowently tutor is up to when they’re not teaching you? Well, wonder no more. After having tutored my fellow city-dwellers for nearly a year, I will now give you a look behind the scenes and walk you through a week in the life of a Flowently tutor!

Let’s start at the end of the week. On Fridays, I teach Christina during a lunchtime session. Christina has a busy job as a global marketing director and was a complete beginner when she started doing sessions. But since her native language is German, she catches on quite quickly: German and Dutch belong to the same language family and share quite some similar sounding words and even linguistic concepts, such as separable verbs. For example, the Dutch uitgaan is ausgehen in German, and when conjugating, it’s broken down in the same way: ik ga uit vs. ich gehe aus. 

After the session, during which Christina and I practice adjectives, vowel pronunciation and time-telling, I make a new session plan for Friday next week. I base the design on the things Christina learnt today. Coming fresh out of the previous session, I can incorporate the things that I noticed need extra attention. I also base the design on Christina’s overall language goals. Because she wants to be able to have an informal chat with somebody she meets in the tram or order successfully in a restaurant when measures allow, we’ll be mainly focusing on conversation and less on text-reading.

Supporting the learning curve

After finishing the session plan, I start composing my weekly Dutch mail. Since my students typically have busy jobs and find little time throughout the week to do homework, I’ve decided to help them with their exposure to Dutch in an undemanding way. I select a little rhyme, or a fun or interesting piece of text, and I think of a short exercise for my students to engage with. This week I picked a small poem Dutch school children used to write in each other’s ‘poetry albums’, and asked my students to fill in the missing pronouns.

I then move onto ‘Stukjes Nederlands’, a collection of helpful resources that I created to help my students improve their Dutch. As a language fan, I am learning Norwegian myself, and through that recently came across an add-on that translates words on a webpage for you when you click on them. No more switching back and forth between your google translate tab and the tab you’re reading! I found it quite useful and saw that the tool features Dutch translation as well, so I added it to my collection.  

Ecological anthropologist

Next to tutoring, I also do research as an anthropologist. Most of the work hours I don’t spend tutoring go towards this job. At the moment I’m wrapping up a research on the creation of knowledge on ecological hazards in Russian and European local communities. I’m also hoping to start a research on (dis)connection in pandemic times in the near future. This means I spend a lot of time talking to people (in the field pre-corona, mostly online now), doing desk research and writing up analysis and research ideas.

Growing and adapting as a tutor

On Saturday, I will enter a Zoom call as a student for a change. Today I’m participating in a workshop for Flowently tutors where we can discuss the progress of our students and receive feedback on the challenges we share. We cover topics such as adjusting teaching styles to different modes of learning when teaching duos, and when to introduce what subjects. It’s good to learn about other tutor’s experiences and gain ideas from how they tackle challenges.

After enjoying the rest of my weekend, it’s time to get some work done for the online teaching course that I’m doing. For a while now, I’ve been doing almost all of my sessions online due to the coronavirus. I have been experimenting with sessions outdoors, but I find online sessions have their benefits as well. Typing out sentences is a lot quicker in a Zoom chat than on a piece of paper, and busy students can keep up their practice by spending their lunch break on Dutch sessions once a week. Therefore it’s time to finish a few course steps and reflect on my students’ current needs and ways to not only adapt to but also make the most of remote teaching.

The next day I notice that a new student has booked a session with me, so I call them to do an informal intake. I always ask them why they want to learn Dutch. Is it to be able to speak to the in-laws in their native tongue, or do they want to be able to have a casual chat with colleagues or neighbors? What is their current level, and what are the materials they might have already worked with? I discovered that my new student has been living in the Netherlands for a while now and understands Dutch quite well. But he’s never able to work up the nerves to speak. So, lots of conversational practice it is!

Written by Zerline Henning

Published by: Flowently

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