It was a very interesting first meeting. Obviously, the first step was getting to know Ray, assessing his skills and figuring out what his goals are. I think his issues are two fold. First, he's dealing with a language barrier, and secondly, and more importantly, he's got a terrible block when it comes to writing. He's so sure he can't write that he literally blocks himself. To start the lesson, I asked him to write me a basic paragraph about why he likes being a state trooper. He got two sentences into it and couldn't write anymore. We had a good conversation about developing ideas and pre-writing, but I'm not sure coming up with ideas is his problem. It's more his anxiety about writing properly. At the end of the lesson, I had him do a 10 minute free write and told him not to think about grammar or structure, just write. He wrote for 10 minutes straight, filled a page and actually made very few grammatical mistakes. His paragraph structure needs work but I think he's a lot better writer than he thinks he is. But we're going to start with basic sentence structure next week and build from there.