psat

this week we started tutoring the 2 kids of jarom’s korean professor. he works with the son, sihyun, who is 10 and about to start 5th grade. I tutor the daughter, daye, who will be a junior this fall. she took the psat a few months ago and is studying to retake it in october, plus the sat next spring.

I had no idea it would be so hard to prepare someone for a test. part of it is probably due to the fact that I myself never took the psat and didn’t study at all for the sat, but a large part is because the vocabulary isn’t used in everyday speech. daye is really smart, but with english as her second language, she’s having to memorize hundreds of words just to answer the multiple choice sentence completion questions. it’s hard to make a good guess when all 5 choices are words you’ve never seen before.

the other problem is that I’m terrible at explaining what words mean. some of the words from the other day are ferocity, obsequious, and distort. when daye doesn’t know any of the synonyms for those words…it gets really complicated. luckily she’s good at memorizing and if she reads a definition enough times she’ll figure out what the word means.

I sure am glad I don’t have to take any more big standardized tests.

microcredit

of all the things I know very little about, microcredit seems to be the best way of actually helping fix some of the world’s problems. at the very least, it helps real people get out of poverty.

unfortunately, microcredit is mostly about money, of which I have very little. I’ve found a lot of organizations that are intermediaries between lenders and borrowers, but aside from making a donation, there isn’t much I can do. for now we just give what we can to the church humanitarian fund, since I think they’re one of the most effective aid organizations in the world. it’s nice that even when we don’t have much we can spare a few dollars to help someone else.

it’s interesting how simple little things really do make a difference. due to a miscommunication, jarom’s dad thought we were down to our last $100 (which is coming up close…but tomorrow is payday), so he brought us the rest of the fresh fruit from the birthday celebrations last weekend. “you can’t get coupons for fruit,” he said. “let us know if there’s anything you guys need.” I really enjoyed the fruit, especially since this is my first summer away from the plentiful orchards of california.