Response 10/2

Both sessions that I went to this week were with freshmen student athletes who were working on papers for English classes. The first student was a football player in a freshman comp class who was very resistant to tutoring. He said that class had been cancelled for that week and as such he didn’t have an assignment for us to work on. Instead Ashley and I invited him to talk about how he was doing in his other classes and what he felt he’d improved on or needed to work on. The session was really tedious as the student offered little to no help with the tutoring. We ended the session a little early after talking about the new strategies he had learned.

The second student was a soccer player originally from Europe working on an interesting prompt. The prompt required her to interview her family about an heirloom recipe passed down through the family. The girl was struggling with this as her family doesn’t tend to use recipes when cooking. Ashley and I asked her to describe her most memorable meal she had eaten with her family. After hearing her story we asked her what was interesting to her and what she might want to do for this assignment. She decided that she would ask her dad about his time learning to cook in general instead of focusing on one recipe. The student had a lot of trouble coming up with questions. Ashley prompted her to write down what she did and didn’t know about what happened and to start there. I had a little trouble co-tutoring on this assignment as the student was very focused on the prompt and forming interview questions was hard to frame into a learning experience for general writing. We ended the session talking about American dialects as the student was still struggling with English and wanted to know how to sound more American in her writing. We discussed accents, expressions, and phrases that were common in Florida and in the south in general. It was honestly really funny to remark on cultural differences between the three of us.