Conversation Partner Meeting #2

After a pretty long hiatus I was able to meet again with Simon on November 3rd at the TCU bookstore. This time only Simon came because he said his friend Harry had a lot of work. I knew that that meant this meeting was going to be a little awkward because Harry spoke much better English than Simon and it didn't help that I speak no Chinese at all. After breaking the ice with some generic, "Hey, how is your week going?" questions we began to talk about the ESL program in a little more depth.

Simon began to explain that his "final exam" was coming up in a little over a month. From what I understand it is a basic English exam with reading, listening, writing, and speaking parts to see if the student understands the English language enough to not be completely lost at TCU. If he were to fail this test then he would have to spend another semester in the ESL program before receiving another chance to take the exam. It sounded like a lot of pressure and it was easy to tell that he was a little nervous and the exam was still a month and half away. This test would definitely have been the most nerve wracking academic evaluation I would have ever had to take. I was never very stressed out about the SAT because I could take it multiple times and learn from my mistakes, but Simon had one opportunity or else he would be stuck in English classes for another four months.

He then asked me how my classes were going. I hope I didn't scare Simon off from being a business major but it had been a long hard week so I complained a lot. It was actually a pretty healthy experience because I am not someone who normally vents a lot but the fact that it was with someone I didn't know particularly well and who maybe couldn't understand everything I was saying made the process easy. Simon seemed shocked that I had so much to do but I was probably exaggerating and being a primma donna.

Overall it was a good conversation although we may have talked a little too much about academics which shouldn't be what we talk about when we're out of class. However, in our next conversation all we talked about was sports which was much more entertaining than boring ole schoolwork.