Reflection Post 9-30

This week I shadowed (and co-tutored a little) Molly Peel in the RWC again. The first session was a no-show, so we talked about what a usual tutoring session is like for her.  First she introduces herself and then asks the student what class they are working on. Then they discuss the assignment: is there a prompt? Do you have the rubric? What phase of the writing process are you in? Is there anything specific you want to work on? If they specify an issue or section, she asks them to read it out loud. If they say no, she asks them to read the whole piece out loud from the beginning. (Here she usually asks if they prefer to read or if they want her to read out loud. Usually they prefer to read it. Giving them that choice makes them feel more comfortable.) 

Then one student athlete came in and talked to us about his annotated bibliography. It was in Chicago Manual Style and Molly wasn’t familiar with the requirements. He was really on top of the assignment—he didn’t have any specific areas of concern and it sounded good to us.

Molly also told me about paper she looked at with a co-tutor last week—it was for a philosophy of sex class and the girl’s argument was something really conservative and offended Molly a little. Both Molly and the girl who was observing the session were at a loss for words. The session challenged her to see beyond the content of the paper and be able to identify structural or large-scale issues.

A second student athlete came in and was in the beginning stages of a persuasive paper about cults and religions. We spent the session time brainstorming. It was really fun! He kept a running list of everything we came up with and then we went through the list and tried to find patterns. We connected some of the ideas and came up with a few good directions for the paper. Afterwards, Molly said that this was the ‘best case scenario’ type of session for her.