Tutoring reflection

Tutoring on my own for the first time was a great experience. I went into it a tight bundle of nerves racking my brain and revisiting our texts to try and grasp any and every bit of information that might be helpful to my potential tutee’s. Most of the nerves came from my first appointment, an hour long block made my a Korean grad-student working on a dissertation funding-proposal, quite the appointment for my first time tutoring without my mentors help. She arrived on time, and was very kind fortunately the language barrier was slight, and that wasn’t an issue. She began by handing me her draft of the proposal, and asking me to make revisions and adjustments with the language so that it is coherent and staying on topic. Not wanting to jump right in immediately, I asked about her class, her studies/focus, and for the rubric itself. Unfortunately she didn’t have the rubric, but all sections of the proposal were divided by their corresponding questions so it wasn’t needed. From there we went chronologically through each section, I read quietly aloud, and when I found something to be awkward/confusing I questioned what she was trying to say. Sometimes not so specifically in a sentence, but the overall idea, so that I could generate a decent assumption of where she was intending this to go. Most of the mistakes throughout were similar in manner, and I felt confident in explaining to her what it was that was incorrect, and my way of addressing the issues. The whole session went really well with her and I loved that I was capable of what I thought I might not be, the peak of the session was finding and analyzing one of her almost-systematic mistakes again and her exclaiming to me “I’m learning”! It was something small and common, but watching her actually apply the way of thinking and approach to the issue, and grasping it made me so very happy.

My second appointment was with a student working on a draft of your run-of-the-mill research paper. He basically wanted to see how well it ‘flowed’, and asked for me to check for grammatical errors. He seemed a little uncomfortable, but I attempted to socialize the situation and when finding issues in the paper, I constantly gave positive comments to reinforce his confidence in the paper.