Monday, September 24, 2007

Monday
Met with the TOEFL tutoring group today. They seem like a nice family. I teach two daughters and one of the daughter’s husband. Two of them, the wife and husband want to study at Harvard. They have two children. The other is younger, about 18, and wants to go to school in the States. I don’t know how much I can do, but I will go through the TOEFL study book with them and speak, listen (and correct), and read and correct their writing for them. However, the days I teach them are long. I get picked up about 7:30 am, arrive and teach for 4 hours and then go directly to school to prepare for classes there and teach. Ah well.

I go to the family’s house to tutor them. They just come in one after another for four hours. I do get a break with coffee/tea and cookies at the two hour mark. So that is good. The wife is a doctor; the husband does something else. Not sure what he does. The house is nice; three stories I think. The family has nine security guards/helpers, one cook, one permanent maid/cook helper, a nanny for the kids, and probably other staff I didn’t see. The paid staff well out numbers the family members. The house has a pool, a landscaped yard, an elaborate play area with artificial turf, a driveway with about eight BMWs, and who knows what else. The property has two security houses, a pool house, and extra cars for the security drivers to use for carting around people like me (I ride in one of the several black Land Cruisers they have). So, I don’t know what they do, but I can see how they might be “politically important.”
We finished watching The Third Man in my film class today and I watched Ghostbusters for fun at home. The first was made around 1950 and was entertaining, but the second is more my generation. I enjoyed both.