Reflection number two

        One of the sessions I co-tutored with was extremely beneficial because of how unprepared the student was. The session was with a student athlete who had to write an essay about something that bothered him. He was distraught about how broad the topic was, so we basically asked him a lot of questions about the class and the professor. Him discussing out loud with us the expectations of the class, and even reviewing his syllabus, made the expected results of the paper a lot clearer to us both. Ironically enough, picking apart the syllabus was where he found inspiration for his paper- he decided something that bothered him was the consequences of plagiarism. Har har har.

At that point we were able to get some ideas flowing, and my mentor begin writing out his ideas as they came to him, chronologically. At the top mentioning his initial ideas, and writing key words that we thought would be useful to reflect on later. This seemed to really help him a lot with constructing his thoughts for the paper into an organized stream of consciousness. He kept the paper at the end of the session for reference, this way when he takes the time to write it later on he’ll have a sort of guided approach, and hopefully the idea of organizing his thoughts that way is something he took with him as well.

His last appointment was canceled, so we decided to make the time block constructive. We sort of switched roles at this point, he handed me a paper he had drafted for one of his classes, and I began reading through it. As I pointed out (minute) imperfections and some structural ‘issues’ he would talk me through how I could point this out in a coherent way to a student/tutee, to help sharpen the distinction between editing and tutoring. This was very helpful on my end, there were some things that I did simply point out, that I would likely need to expand upon, and show how it works/doesn’t work in a way that someone who is not so natural at writing would be able to comprehend.