DB

This week I tutored with a different person which was a nice change from what I did last week. Colleen Mayo offered a refreshing take on many things that my previous mentor didn't really touch on such as true intent of the paper and helping the student think about why their professor wanted them to write the paper. I think by taking this kind of approach, students were more inclined to open up to Colleen and really articulate what they wanted the paper to be about.

The first student was a young girl who is enrolled in that new required genre course. She was writing a paper about Gotochapter.com, an online resource that her sorority uses to connect with each other and keep updated on a variety of things. Colleen asked the student if she would like to read her paper out loud or of she preferred that Coleen read it out loud. The student started reading and almost instantly caught a multitude of errors just by going over and reading by herself. Colleen also guided the student by making her go through all of her paragraphs and pulling out the main idea of each one. She then had the student wrote down three examples or supporting pieces of evidence for this particular main idea. This allowed the student to streamline her paper and eliminate un-needed information without Colleen specifically mentioning that something was irrelevant.
The paper also was extremely repetitive and Colleen approached this by asking the student, "Does the rubric tell you to introduce what you're about to talk about?". The student then realized that she had mentioned the same idea over and over again and Colleen didn't have to point it out.

In our next session the student was writing an essay that connected themes from the Chronicles of Narnia to religious themes present in the Bible to make an overall point that women were the downfall of men. It was not only a pretty misogynistic piece of writing but his comparisons really didn't make sense.  Colleen asked him to read the piece out loud and he did but didn't find any corrections on his own. Overall it was a very strange session because he honestly saw nothing wrong with his paper which was extremely disjoined and just didn't make any sense. Every suggestion Colleen gave him seemed to go in one ear and out the other and he would just nod his head and change the subject.

These sessions were like night and day but I think I learned a lot from both of them.