TP9

Today I met John and his family at the public library as usual. Unusually, however, they were a few minutes late - this gave me the opportunity to wonder about what John and I might talk about for conversation practice, as well as run into Hayley's friend Megan that I had just been hanging out with last night at Hayley's "birthday" party. Incidentally, she was tutoring Jason and Sally's cousin! What a small town Tallahassee is.

I was thinking about asking John about his research with FSU, and that was exactly what he wanted to discuss. He is finalizing a research paper to summarize the efforts of his study, and wanted my help editing and revising it for grammar and clarity. It was a bit much to jump right into it, so I talked to him for a few minutes first about the kind of experiments he was conducting, and then did some quick browsing of a few science-y articles on Wikipedia, which he helped to explain in further detail. Once I had a grasp of what he was trying to learn and the methods he used to obtain his data, we began to look at his paper and I made suggestions on how to make it more concise and readable. The focus of his research is to find the best method for extracting the beneficial antioxidants (phenolic compounds and flavonoids), by using different ratios of water/ethanol/methanol and organic solvents. He had innumerable references in his paper and I was  impressed with completeness of the study. Before I left I told him that if he wanted more help, he could e-mail me his paper or just send me sentences that he was unsure about and I would respond with my suggestions.

I'm looking forward to helping John make his research paper more accessible in English, and hopefully will have more opportunities to work with his kids on their English skills as well.