Same Yet Different

My first ‘real’ tutoring session went fairly well. I was busy for a Friday, I had three appointments all of which were totally different but had similar qualities. I was pretty nervous to tutor today because I didn’t want to make things awkward or there to be an extended silence. Luckily none of these things happened.

My first session was with a young lady who was working on a pear for her gender roles in religion class. She was a freshman who had got into the class during Drop-Add and told me that it was the last available class she could take I got the vibe that she wasn't too interested in the subject material which made it hard to pry answers out of her when I asked specific questions about what she was learning in class. The paper’s thesis centered around the discrimination of women within smaller religious circles and how they affected said religions as a whole. While I was unfamiliar with the specific religious circles she talked about, I was able to understand where she wanted to go with her paper and help guide her in the right direction. He main issue was stagnant sentence structure, ‘I am….,I feel…, I believe…, I think…, I know…’ I helped her combine some of these sentences to flow better and help the paper become more reader friendly. I also looked at her paragraph structure and central arguments. She said she was happy with the session.

The second session I was working with a young lady who was applying for a Black Student Advocates scholarship and had to write an essay on a time that she demonstrated courage or took a stand against injustice. The essay had virtually NO requirements. Like literally the directions for this paper was only one sentence. This made it difficult because she wanted to take the essay in a direction that was non-academic and non-traditional and me being me, wanted to make it a by-the-book type essay. Her essay resembled prose and was really artsy and beautiful but didn’t flow like a standard essay would. I tried to help her as much as I could and only focused on what SHE wanted to focus on but it was difficult.

The last student was a young woman in the same class as my first tutoree and was working on THE SAME PAPER WITH THE SAME EXACT THESIS. What are the odds? Anyways she had a better grasp on the subject matter than the first girl and her only issue was super duper long sentences that stretched the length of an entire paragraph. She also would start a paragraph with one idea and veer off towards another.  Overall it was a beneficial session.