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.