10/2 Response

This week, I experienced one of the same students as last week.  The student is an athlete that is required to come to tutoring at the RWC.  However, he is still pretty optimistic during his tutoring.  Unfortunately, he did not have a lot to work on, so the session only last for about 30 minutes instead of the allotted time of 1 hour.  During the 30 minutes, the student read through his past poems.  Jonathan read some of them aloud, and I read the others aloud.  From this, the student picked his top 4.  These were the poems he was planning on putting in his portfolio for his professor.  Jonathan and I mentioned what we really liked in each poem, but ultimately, the decision was up to the student.
    Once this decision was made, we then gave short suggestions for each poem.  Jonathan suggested cutting a few lines from one poem.  The things he wanted to cut were not as concrete as the other images in the poem.  I suggested adding question marks to 3 lines in one poem.  When each of us read the poem aloud, we were already reading the phrases as questions, so why not put a little punctuation in the poem?  Jonathan then suggested restructuring another poem.  The student agreed to this because the action of the poem really started in the "middle."
          The next session was with an international doctoral student.  Obviously, this student was academically above Jonathan and I, and his paper was on economics, something neither of us knew much about.  Yet, this student still needed help making sure he was practicing correct grammar and English phrases.  Initially, it was very hard for me to understand this student.  After a couple of minutes, the student became a little more comfortable and addressed questions to both Jonathan and I.  When he started talking more, it became easier for me to understand him.  This was encouraging.  Mainly, this student was struggling with articles and prepositions.  These were easy fixes.  The trickier fixes were those caused by overly wordy sentence structures.  Jonathan and I would suggest possible sentence alternatives until the student heard one that he thought best fit his intentions for the student.  This was an example of necessary line editing.  Unlike most students, when this student asked for "grammar help," he really meant it.  His paper was already 36 pages long, so obviously he had well developed ideas.  This student just wanted to make sure he sounded as smart in his second languages as he presumably does in his first language.