9/25 Response

Overall, I really enjoyed my Observation session with my peer tutoring mentor, Clare. She is a graduate student studying comparative literature. During our email correspondence she asked that I come earlier to the session so that we could go over the parameters of the tutoring. I found that I learned the most from her before, after and in between tutoring sessions.

Before visiting the RWC I composed a list of questions that I planned to ask Clare before her session so that I could understand better how she personally liked to work with her students. Some of my biggest concerns were how to work with students who had no idea where to start and students who had to write about topics concerning areas that I am unfamiliar with. Her biggest advice? Ask lots and lots of questions. That was her most frequent answer. I also asked her if she ever felt any pressure to go straight into line-editing when a student came into a session. Clare explained to me that her best interest was to focus on what the student needs most, so if that is only proofreading than she does just that. But, she makes it a point to pay attention to grammar whilst going through the writing assignment no matter what the student comes into the RWC for. She also noted  that she makes an extra point to always check grammar if she is tutoring an International student because often, their use of English language in their papers are more prone to error. In Clare's opinion the most important part of the tutoring process is listening to the student and applying whatever you know to help the student understand the writing process.

On Wednesday Clare had three appointments. One who was an international student, actually did not show up and she took that time to explain to me the "Client Report Form." All Peer Tutors have to fill our this form at the end of each session, it acts as a sort of reflection on how the session went. The tutor can include what they worked on with the student as well as what they will work on for a future visit and if they did not show up for their session at all, it is recorded through the online RWC system.

Clare's second appointment was an international student who had a short story assignment. The student asked Clare if she could read it to make sure that it "made sense," a phrase that I noticed students commonly used but did not really understand. Clare started off by asking the student what
her understanding of the assignment was and if she had a rubric or assignment sheet with her. Clare then began to read the short story aloud to the student and along the way would make small grammar changes, asking questions like "is this what you meant to say?" and "What did you mean by this?" Posing these questions after reading it for the student to hear how their thoughts sounded helped to clarify this student's paper. By the end of the session, Clare had only made grammatical changes and switched the order of a few sentence Afterwards, she filled out the Client Report Form and we waited for the next student.

The student in the last session had a final draft of an essay about Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." In the assignment, the student had to analyze how "Common Sense" had affected the audience of the time. Clare posed similar questions in the beginning of the session like "what would you like me to look at?" "Would you mind if I read this aloud?" From there Clare read the essay but there turned out to be not many errors. The students main concerns were the flow of the essay, if she had repeated herself too much in the conclusion in reference to the information she talked about in her introduction paragraph, and if her works cited page was correct. After reviewing the entire essay we went to the conclusion and compared it to the introduction. Clare explained that the idea of the concluding paragraph was to summarize but also introduce a new idea, which the student did in fact do. Lastly, Clare looked at the works cited and saw that the formatting for an MLA paper was not correct. She brought up what the requirements were on her laptop and share an OWL Purdue online resource that many students reference for MLA questions.

Clare is a very attentive and helpful tutor and I really like to see her work with her students.  It was definitely apparent to keep in mind that the students interest is what the tutor should focus on and to let them guide the session because most of them they have more knowledge about the assignment that the tutor does. I will definitely be recalling the tips that Clare shard with me during my tutoring experiences in the hopes that I can successfully help students in the way that Clare has.