Argh. I just had to spend about fifteen minutes with the Timesucker. This is a guy who is constantly going up to whoever he can find and going on and on trying to get them to help him with his reading and classwork and everything, taking far more time than is reasonable. While annoying to the staff, he also does this to other students, walking up to people at random in the library and trying to ask them questions! I had to separate him today from a girl he was talking to who was probably too polite to try to stop him.
The problem is that his English really isn't strong enough to be taking the courses he's trying to take. He really needs intense one-on-one tutoring (and accent reduction, at that - his accent is terribly thick). Poor guy, he's been trying to get through To Kill a Mockingbird and has to translate a word or phrase in practically every sentence into Farsi. (The aforementioned fifteen minutes was spent on going through about two paragraphs.) Fortunately someone set him up with an online dictionary today to do just that, but while it helped him with words like "ambidextrous" and "balcony", I really couldn't come up with a good way to explain "I thought Jem was counting his chickens." Blergh.
The problem is that his English really isn't strong enough to be taking the courses he's trying to take. He really needs intense one-on-one tutoring (and accent reduction, at that - his accent is terribly thick). Poor guy, he's been trying to get through To Kill a Mockingbird and has to translate a word or phrase in practically every sentence into Farsi. (The aforementioned fifteen minutes was spent on going through about two paragraphs.) Fortunately someone set him up with an online dictionary today to do just that, but while it helped him with words like "ambidextrous" and "balcony", I really couldn't come up with a good way to explain "I thought Jem was counting his chickens." Blergh.