After my utter disaster called a first lesson, I soon settled into a good pace of learning with my student. Just to remind the not so regular reader of this blog - I've been tutoring a Chinese lady who is illiterate in both Chinese and English, plus doesn't speak much more English than "how are you, I'm fine". Or so I thought.

The amazing experience is watching the penny drop. When things that she knows but doesn't know quite fully suddenly make sense. Now she struggles with individual words, next, a full sentence appears, and the delight of understanding, reading, speaking. More than anything, we're enjoying the lessons, both of us.

Even more mindboggling is to see how much she learns between lessons. She is a very clever lady, I knew that from the start, she was simply never given an opportunity to learn, and now that she's got one, she takes every bit of it. She gets her 5 year old daughter who is learning to read at school to read her own work out to her, to revise with her. This way, both daughter and mother learn and practice their reading and writing. The beauty of it is that she comes back having progressed miles, she stuns me, every week.

Apparently, she even managed to ring her doctor to make an appointment. Without help. I have no idea how she did that, but never underestimate your learner! What I can see is that she can now write her own address confidently, she is much more confident writing in general, and takes pleasure out of reading words and short sentences. She loves getting things right, and will repeat until she is there. She has now taken full control of the learning, and no longer feels silly if she can't do something I ask her to do.

I am learning too. Mainly, that I can actually communicate fairly well with a person who I don't share a language with. gestures, pictures, and above all facial expressions go much further than I ever thought possible. We actually have a rapport, a rapport of smiles and the willingness to communicate.