Session 10/30

This week's session was fairly normal. I ended up only having one student the entire time because my other two appointments didn't show up. The student who did show up was Elizabeth and she wanted to go over her personal statement for graduate school. I thought that it was interesting that we were working on her personal statement right after we did the presentations in class and that was someone's topic. So when I was helping Elizabeth with her statement, I tried to keep in mind some of the stuff that I learned from the presentation such as key things to look out for. Elizabeth's statement was stellar in the information that it had-- she had great credentials and worked with a lot of organizations for community projects. However, it kind of read like a list or a resume. What we decided to do was see where we could add some color to the statement to make it come alive. She did a whole project in Costa Rica where she worked with children and I told Elizabeth that it would be great to see some action from this project. Something that I have learned when building my resume and writing cover letters as I prepare to go out in the real world, is that they want to see what you did, not just hear about it. So that was the main theme we created in Elizabeth's statement-- to show the reader what she worked on. She also said that she wanted to look at grammar and punctuation, but it turned out that she didn't really have an issue with that. However, I was reading it through, I would read aloud sentences that sounded a bit wonky so she could hear it and then we worked together to fix it. Elizabeth was prepared and pretty much knew what needed work and so it was easy to go from there and fix things. That also allowed us the freedom to be a bit nit-picky at the end because the overall statement was cleaned up well.

Blog Post 10/30

            During my last session on Wednesday, October 28, my tutee, Silun Li, and I discussed a paper she had written about the movies "Black Hawk Down" and "Working Girl," and how they both relate to a book she was referring to throughout her paper about the standards, frames, and hierarchy of our society. We corrected a few minor grammatical errors throughout her paper, and fixed the formatting to match APA requirements. I found that Silun Li’s writing was very strong and concise, which made it easy to focus on grammatical errors and the formatting of her paper because the actual content of it was excellent. Silun Li discussed very intricate social issues, relating them to the topics in the book she was required to write about, all including problems with hierarchy, authority, and modern-day social framework. She did a wonderful job incorporating the two movies, both about very different topics, with the main idea of the paper and the issues at hand.

            Silun Li and I worked together for a little over an hour, reading through her paper and fixing minor grammatical errors. She was very sweet and agreed with all of my suggestions, making the session go smoothly and enjoyably. She was very grateful at the end of the session, and although I was more confident about certain parts of it than others, she made me feel like I had made a difference in her paper, which was the most rewarding feeling for me as an inexperienced tutor. She was planning to read over her paper a few more times and fix a few more minor formatting errors before submitting it at 4 pm that afternoon. I wished her luck, and felt good about her paper myself, as Silun Li’s writing was powerful and knowledgeable, and after the session, grammatically correct and formatted. She was an incredible tutee as she came prepared and ready for suggestions, making my second tutoring session another incredible one. I am looking forward to next week, as it will allow me to add yet another completely unique tutoring session under my belt, enriching my experiences week by week. 

The one appointment I had on Friday was Heather, a sophomore. She had written a paper for a multicultural film class and asked me to look over her final draft. This was another case of a student who came in solely for the purpose of grammatical revision. The purpose of the paper was to relate an article to a film. I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to offer too much help without having seen the movie myself, but it turned out to be a successful tutoring session.

Her teacher had looked over the paper ahead of time so there weren't many structural issues. I did notice some weak sentences and grammatical issues. She was a good writer but I was surprised to find that she didn't know the difference between forms of "their", "they're" and "there." I circled them and pointed out why they were incorrect, without judgement.

Luckily, the paper revolved around themes of hypermasculinity in the media. This is a topic I am passionate about so I was able to help clarify some examples because I knew what points she was trying to make, and hopefully that made the essay stronger. For the short paper that it was (only 500 words,) I think the examples of hypermasculinity in the movie that she pointed out clearly supported her thesis.

One thing I got out of this appointment actually applied to my research paper topic. When I complimented her essay she discredited the compliment by telling me that writing is not her forte because she is a finance major. I feel like she didn't have to limit herself with that label, but rather she chose not to focus on improving her writing over time because she didn't think it would be relevant to her life later on, therefore not meeting her full potential. So even though there are certain stigmas associated with choice of major, gender is not the most influential factor in that choice. She disproved the hypothesis writing is a feminine-centric study.

Earlier in the week I was scheduled to have an hour-long appointment for 10:00, who cancelled. So I have yet to tutor for a full hour which I'm sure will pose different challenges than half-hour appointments.

10/28 response

This week, I only had one 30 minute tutoring session, but I actually feel really good about it.  The student started by saying that she had intended to come in with a full draft, but due to a personal tragedy, only had a couple of paragraphs.  When she went to open the document, she also got an e-mail accepting her into a summer internship in England, so that drastically brightened her mood after recounting the tragedy.  She then showed me what she had.  Basically, she was supposed to visit a museum and write about her experience and relate it to the in class readings.  So far, she had described the actual trip but not much about how she liked it or how it related to the readings.  So, I decided to ask her these questions, and she responded very well.  It was clear she was very passionate about the subject and had a lot of knowledge on it.  She explained that the museum was an example of the "white cube" model of a museum...or something like that, I don't remember the exact term.  Apparently, museums used to be super colorful and exciting but now they are more commonly minimalist, allowing the viewer to focus only on the art.  She also explained that each piece had very little information about it.  I asked her if she liked that or would have wanted more.  She explained that she would have liked more information but she also understood how that fit in with the minimalist theme.  She said that the pieces were not connected like a narrative, which is what she would have ideally done had it been her exhibit.  She said this made the viewer do a little more work and the curator a little less.  I then asked her if the museum was how she expected it to be before she went, or if it was different.  She said it was definitely different from what she imagined.  Because it was an exhibit on circus art, she had imagined it very colorful and grand.  Obviously, it was minimalist, and therefore none of the above.  She also stated that she thought that the curator chose minimalist not because it fit best, but because museums often follow that theme when they have a limited budget with which to work.  When she left, she said that talking through all of her ideas was definitely helpful.  I encouraged her saying she was obviously very knowledgeable on the subject so she shouldn't have a problem with this paper.

10/28 Refletion

This week I did not tutor any students. I did have an appointment scheduled for the first hour of my session, but my student did not show up. The last thirty minutes of my tutoring session were open for walk-ins and I was hoping a student would show up but, unfortunately, no one came. Hopefully next week more students will come to the writing center for help. I would like to keep tutoring students and be able to gather research as I start to work on project #3.

Blog Post 10/28

This week I tutored three people. The first guy was an Indonesian graduate student—English was his second language. He wasn’t confident in his grammar and usage. We read through his paper out loud together and cleaned up some sentences. I had a hard time pointing out some of his mistakes—for example, I would read out a sentence that was obviously very messed up expecting him to stop me. But most of the time he didn’t. So I struggled because I wanted to stay in the passenger seat. There were patterns in his errors, too, and I hope I did a good job of teaching him the correct way while remaining polite. I also hope I wasn’t too polite, because I think I tend to be too nice and wind up sounding unsure. Anyways. We went over a one-page paper and some excerpts from his CV. He asked me to write my name down so that he could see me next week as well, which made me smile.

               After that, a girl came in and needed some help proofreading a blog post she had to submit to her teacher (kinda like this). She said she was required to come to the RWC and that her visit was to fulfill the class requirement. So I could tell she didn’t take the tutoring session very seriously. We mostly talked about what she wrote about—she had an interesting experience while giving out sack lunches to homeless people in Tallahassee. She wrote about an emotional encounter between herself and a homeless woman. I told her that, although this assignment was just for her teacher and not something serious, she could always explore the topic further. I told her it could potentially be a great personal essay. (I think she was flattered :) ).

               The last session was interesting. A girl came in with her syllabus and said she had absolutely no idea what her teacher wants from an assignment or how to even begin writing. She asked me what a critical analysis was. At first, I was caught off guard. Did she want me to tell her how to begin outlining an essay? Did she want an example of a thesis statement? How do I tell her this off the top of my head? I wound up doing just that. I told her step by step what I would do in her situation. Read the prompt and identify a subject to write about. Collect support from class lectures and readings. Think of a position on the topic. Brainstorm possible thesis statements. Make an outline. I think I helped her. She said she would do those things and then come back to the RWC to work on a rough draft. Yay! I feel like I learned something from that tutoring session too.

10/26

           I had two really great sessions this week, so far all of my sessions have been going really well and I’m really glad about it. My first session was with a girl who came in with a rough draft of a cultural ethnography essay, for an Introduction to World Religions class. Though she said that she was given no rubric, and her professor was unclear on what the paper should be about, we were able to navigate towards the assumed goal. It was a very comfortable session and the tutee was very engaged. She was honest in telling me exactly where she knew her paper strayed from the purpose or intent, and I was able to clearly explain what was bridging the gap between ethnographic research and a narrative/personal essay style. A gap that shouldn’t be filled, of course. Other than that, she did bring up ‘grammar’ as something I should look at, and noticing few to no grammatical mistakes I assured her that there weren’t real issues with that in her paper, and that this wouldn’t be something she might feel inclined to seek help for.

            My next hour-long session was really enjoyable as well; a girl came in with an essay for the new required English class. The paper was a basic research essay and her topic was sororities. It was fun because we connected right after the bat; I was able to explain some of the errors like I was talking to a friend of mine. We went through it from the introduction, the bulk of the paper, and with a little time left I was able to look over the concluding paragraph as well. Her paper was actually done quite well, we worked on some MLA citation errors, some structural flaws. Some of her topic sentences were a little unclear; similarly the endings of some of her main paragraphs and her transitions were not concise and left me as a reader unsure of where the paper was going. For the most part we worked on rearranging and condensing certain sentences to help the paper read more easily.

First Session

         My first appointment was an hour long session.  The student cam in stating that they were going to turn in their paper online right after the session, so all they were really looking for was a quick proofread (I'm not really sure why she scheduled an entire hour for that).  The student also stated that she had worked on this paper in a couple other sessions at the RWC, so she was pretty confident in it conceptually.  Because the student was planning on turning the paper in very soon, I did work with her mainly on grammar. The paper was on events that involved evil and how evil can take over a seemingly normal person.  The student mentioned Hitler's takeover of Germany, a prison, and the recent killing of Michael Brown.  Overall, the student's grammar mistakes were few.  Most of the mistakes just looked like typos.  I did, however, show her possible paragraph breaks.  The student only made paragraphs when she moved on to the next incident.  This caused entire pages to not have paragraph breaks.  I explained that it's easier for the instructor to read her paper if it's broken up neatly.  I also showed pointed out her transition words and explained that these could be possible paragraph breaks because they indicated a slight change in topic.
         My second appointment of the day was 30 minutes with a girl who was coming into brainstorming.  However, the student did end up coming in with almost two pages of writing so far.  She stated that her paper was supposed to analyze two different authors take on one subject-pluralism.  I asked her to explain pluralism to me and what she thought each author's stance on the topic was.  She explained that pluralism is the idea that different religions can coexist.  The author she already wrote on believed that pluralism was indeed a possibility.  The other author took the previous author's writings and pointed out how it could not work.  This second author was the one with which she need help brainstorming.  I asked her to show me where in the text she thought the author stated his main argument.  I read that and then asked to read what she already had on the first author, to compare the two ideas.  While reading through the points she already had on the author who was pro-pluralism, I asked her how the other author responded to each of these points.  She thought through this question and we were able to write down her thoughts so she could reference them when she actually went to write later.  I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to help her too much because her topic was very in depth and the reading passages were difficult to understand without context on the subject.  Yet, as she was leaving she thanked me saying that she was excited to address the topics we had come up with and she definitely left with more than she came in with.  That was definitely encouraging.

First Session 10/16 Reflection

Last week I tutored in the Reading and Writing Center by myself for the first time. I talked to my mentor right before and she gave me some words of wisdom. At that point, knowing she believed in me, I felt more confident. Two cups of coffee down, I was over-energetic for my first appointment.

The girl was preparing a cover letter and resume for job applications. I have never written a cover letter before, so I made sure to tell her I could help her with the writing aspect of it (word choice, looking for sentence fragments, etc.), but I did not know how a cover letter should sound, besides telling employers why they should hire you. She told me that it was perfectly fine because all she needed help with was the writing aspect of it. We read through it together and I made suggestions regarding sentence placement and sentence agreement (is that the term?). Despite the few errors, she sounded confident and enthusiastic, so from my perspective, I thought it was a good cover letter.

The second student I worked with was revising his final draft for an essay in World Religions. I took that class over summer, but I guess they give different assignments to students during the year, so I wasn’t familiar with the paper topic unfortunately. The first thing I noticed was he was missing an introduction, but once looking through the first paragraph, he basically had an introduction within it. I advised him to make a paragraph break and to add a thesis. Besides a few citation errors, missing words, sentence fragments, he presented a really good argument. And I made sure to tell him!

The final student I tutored was working on an application for the Garnet and Gold Society. She had to discuss a personal experience volunteering/helping others that shaped who she was as a person or something. She decided to talk about her experiences in nursing school and working with patients. I built rapport with the student by telling her I have two nurses in my family: my mom and sister! The part of the application that she wanted to work on only had to be 250 words, so we spent the majority of the time picking her brain. She explained to me that she knows what she wants to say, but she doesn’t know how to write it on paper. With that, I asked her to just talk to me about her experiences in the hospital, dealing with patients, and how it made her feel. I was able to work with her and watch her write a really great explanation, just by getting her to talk to me. That strategy really does work!

Overall, I had a great experience tutoring last week and I am excited to continue. All the students were so thankful and sweet, which makes it all worth it!

First Session

     My first two tutoring sessions were a success. I initially went into the RWC feeling extremely nervous, but when I met my first tutee, Makayla, I immediately felt more at ease. Makayla was prepared for the session, seeking a finalized revision for her Garnet and Gold society application. We discussed her application, going through her answers to all the specific questions that the application asked. The student's answers to these questions were based on the student's past experiences in the medical field through internship, international travels, and personal experiences. She had a very clear, concise writing style, with very few errors, making revision much less difficult. She also had a wonderful variety of experiences through her internships and travels that were very interesting to read about. Makayla and I revised a few minor grammatical errors in her application answers, and brainstormed a few more examples of experiences that she could add to enrich her responses. Once her responses are finalized, Makayla will allow her instructor to read through her application one last time for a final revision before submission. I felt that our session went really well and I truly enjoyed working with Makayla.

     My second session was with Justine, a student working to finalize her paper for a criminal justice class. I was very fortunate that my first two tutoring sessions were both involving final revisions. Justine and I discussed her research paper, which was centered around the topic of good and evil in society, and how evil overcomes good in many social situations and why. Justine’s paper talked a lot about the Trayvon Martin case, and the Stanford Prison experiment. Her writing style, like Makayla’s, was very clean and had very few errors. Justine had a few questions about MLA formatting, though her paper was already almost perfectly formatted, regarding MLA standards. I proofread her paper, which was wonderfully written with very strong points and a great thesis. A few very minor grammatical errors were corrected. Justine seemed pleased with the final product, ready for submission that same day. I left the RWC feeling extremely happy and lucky regarding the tutees I was able to work with and how both sessions went that afternoon. I am really looking forward to next week.

First Session

My first solo tutoring session went pretty well. I was excited and nervous at the same time, but my mentor was in the same room, so I wasn't too worried. My first scheduled appointment had actually canceled so I ended up meeting with a walk-in who just happened to come in right when my first appointment was to have started. This student had a short story completely written, he was getting close to his final draft, and asked me to read it through and make sure everything was coherent and written well. He didn't want to read it aloud so I read it and made positive notes as I went through. When I got the end was when I took out the notepad and went through some issues that I had found. Some of them were minor like proper punctuation with quotes, so we didn't spend too much time on those. In order to make sure that I understood the story correctly, I had him tell me what the story was about and what he really liked about it and some things that he wasn't sure about it. The things that he thought he did well on were also things that I enjoyed when reading his story, and then the issues that he found were pretty much the same ones that I found. So, we went over those together. He was open about making changes and had a lot of knowledge about what did and didn't work and took in what I said well. My second session actually went a bit long, but it ended up being okay because my third session was a no show. With this second session we were just brainstorming because she didn't have anything written down yet, but she did know what she was writing it on. She had to write a paper in APA style, which I wasn't that familiar on, but I made sure to be as helpful as I could from what I remembered on APA. And then what I wasn't sure about, we looked up. We broke her paper into three sections because it was a biography of someone so we were going by the stages of their life. We then found sources for her to use and figured how to approach the abstract. She has a couple of weeks until the paper is due so she said that she wanted to come back and set an appointment with me to see the progress of her paper.My third appointment did not show up so I hung out at the center while I finished the reports for the students that I did meet with.

My first solo tutoring session went much better than expected! I was very nervous about tutoring on my own but my mentor Casey really made me feel more confident about my potential to be a helpful tutor. 

I scheduled my hours on Fridays from 10:00-11:30; today I was surprised by how quickly the time flew by. My first appointment was an hour with a group of three engineering students working on their senior project. They came to me with something they were calling "phase one" of their assignment. It was essentially a 30 page proposal of how they planned on solving a hypothetical problem presented to them by their teacher. Two of the three students were international from Panama City and wanted to let me know ahead of time that their grammar and spelling might need some attention. They did have quite a few mistakes including improper verb tenses and several misspelled words, which they almost always noticed and corrected as we read the paper together. I know that we are not supposed to really focus on grammar and the like but I could tell it was something they were concerned about and appreciated being made aware of the mistakes. Is this ok to do? Are we perhaps supposed to approach grammar and spelling differently when it comes to international students? Despite these small corrections the paper itself was well done and easy to understand. One of the students explained to me that the paper had to be written in a way that would be accessible to all readers, not just other engineering majors. I believe they were very thorough and the paper was off to a good start. 

My second appointment was only half an hour with an ENC1101 student. The assignment required her to pick a song that she identified with and write a sort of analytical essay. The teacher provided them with a few question to answer such as the origin of the song, if it came about during any social movements, how the student specifically identifies with it, and so on. She had started a rough draft with just a couple paragraphs that we workshopped together. She was having trouble coming up with a strong thesis statement but once we read through the paper together I was able to point out to her the topics that she had already begun to discuss and encouraged her to build her thesis statement around those ideas. 

I really love the collaborative aspect of peer-tutoring and I can tell that something as simple as having a conversation about what the student has written can boost his/her confidence in the writing process.