10/9 Response

This week was our last week co-tutoring in the RWC before we get to go out on our own and I can confidently say that my mentor Clare has prepared me to the best of her abilities. I went to the RWC this past Wednesday and met with Clare earlier to go over my previous weeks tutoring experience and ask her any questions and discuss my tutoring reservations. She assured me that she thought I was ready but I am still nervous to tutor on my own. The first student cancelled their appointment but I tutored two other students that day.

The first student was a freshman taking ENC1101. He came and explained that he wanted a "grammar sweep" of his paper and that is what we worked on. I read his paper aloud. Originally, my plan was to read it first and come back to make corrections. As I read, I discovered that his paper was nearing about eight pages and I started to make my corrections in the interim of reading his paper. He has a few MLA formatting issues and had copied and pasted his quotations, even though he cited them. After we read through  I made sure to give him the proper form of citing a source so that it does not look like he plagiarized. Also, for future reference I used this session as an example of how if I have to work on grammar, to edit as I go along reading the paper.

The second was a nursing student who was working on a paper for her Women in Literature class. I had never taken the class but she was writing about a novel written by Virginia Woolf who I encountered in a few of my poetry classes and that helped during our discussion. She had to incorporate a theme and compare and contrast it with other novels. Her concerns were that she had used too many other novels and so after reading through it, we examined each paragraph and went over why and if it was important to the development of her paper.

These two sessions were extremely different and I believed that helped me to pull from my own English knowledge to help each student the best that I could. During the first session the focus was grammar, MLA formatting and citing sources in relation to a student who probably is not too familiar with college level writing as a freshman. He was unaware of a few things but I took the time to show him resources so that he could better be prepare for future assignments. During the second session, my nursing student, a senior had a pretty well developed paper and was familiar with MLA formatting guidelines but needed more assistance in the development of her writing. I enjoyed woking with both students and will take the lessons I learned into my future tutoring sessions. In addition to gaining knowledge about tutoring I was able to see the vast resources that the RWC offers. I actually discussed with Clare that I will be coming to the RWC to see her with help for graduate school application essay. Overall, I am extremely excited to work with students next week and hope that I can apply everything from the past few weeks of learning and make a good impresison -