Observation Reflection

My observation session was on Tuesday. After arriving at the RWC a little earlier, I saw that my mentor Calvin was still with a student from an earlier appointment. He waved me to come in and I sat at a table nearby and waited for the session to end. Almost immediately, when that session was over, the student for his 3:00 PM appointment came in. She was a first-year student working on a paper for an ENC 1101 class. Apparently the student has seen Calvin before and came in with a future draft of her paper. The draft was a peer reviewed one where several of her fellow students wrote various comments on it. The topic of the paper was a personal one where the student wrote about her past experiences in high school and how they led up to her current time in college The time was spent talking about the various peer comments, and both she and the tutor came to the conclusion that most of them weren't that helpful. The paper itself was almost done with only a few grammatical mistakes that needed correcting. The session was scheduled to be an hour long, and since both the student and Calvin finished up talking about her paper a bit earlier, the session then went to her discussing brainstorming ideas for a future assignment. It was for a modern popular music class where she has to make a playlist of songs and write about them (why she chose the songs, common themes in each, etc). She already had the songs she wanted written on a piece of paper, so her and Calvin went into writing about what she can discuss on her paper. The student talked about how she wanted to talk about the common themes in each song and why the songs were important to her. Calvin agreed that that was a good topic to write about. The student seems to be someone who goes to the RWC often. It was very clear that she was there before, and when the session ended, she told Calvin that she will be back again next week when she has a draft written.

The session ended with about fifteen minutes to spare. In that extra time, Calvin showed me the client reports that need to be filled out after each session. He advised me that when that when I get to tutoring by myself, that it would be best to fill out the reports as soon as possible while the session is still fresh in your mind.

After that, the student for his next appointment came in a few minutes early and the session began. The student had a draft for a research paper for her Advertising class that was due the next day. She told Calvin that she only wanted him to look at grammar, but he suggested that they talk about it a little deeper as well. Before he even took a look at the paper, he had the student explain to him what her paper was about. She explained her project, and the research data she gathered for it. After that, Calvin went into reading her draft. He noticed that from a grammatical standpoint the paper was fine. The main issue was clarity as there were several parts of her paper that were hard to tell what she was trying to say. The main area where this was a problem was her opening paragraph, where her thesis statement was not clear. As a result, Calvin had the student read that particular sentence to herself for about a minute. After that, he gave her a pen and a piece of paper and told her to rewrite the sentence without looking back at her paper. The rewritten version was much more clear and more effective at conveying her thesis. This process was repeated throughout the paper.

Overall, I thought that Calvin is a great tutor. He was very friendly with the students which made them more comfortable and less nervous. He also wasn't afraid to engage in a little small talk, just to get to know the client a little better. His technique where he had the student rewrite a particular sentence seemed to work wonders every time, and after seeing its success, it is definitely something that I will be doing myself with students when I get to tutoring.