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.