Week 3 of co-tutoring

My final week of co-tutoring offered some insight I had yet to understand about tutoring in a few aspects. The first appointment who sat down with us was a seemingly typical situation, a girl writing a paper that was due the following day, had just started because she spent the weekend too sick to work. The paper was on reworking a museums mission statement, expanding upon her new ideas, with an intention to serve a greater purpose in the community. With no knowledge of the history that the museum she had chosen displayed, I was hesitant in instructing her throughout the paper. Fortunately, after showing us her rubric, we were able to clearly outline the steps that the teacher made clear would need to be taken in order to write a clear and well-written paper. With this outline, and her knowledge of the information, we were able to help her begin with her writing processes. While we worked through it, suggestions on grammatical errors and diction were brought up in a way that she was able to catch her mistakes as we questioned them (rather than simply pointing to them). Questions like ‘Do you need this?’ or ‘Did you mean to put this here?’ were the best way I found my mentor approached her few mistakes, this approach made her feel comfortable in understanding these issues, it seemed she’d be able to pick up on that sort of error on her own. She also read the paper aloud often, and not surprisingly, this benefited her paper tremendously.

            We then saw Shamar, who is a student athlete seen regularly by my mentor, Nick. We had worked with him before and he usually displayed a positive attitude, but this session he showed a lot more resistance. He came prepared with poems to edit, and was rushing to leave. We were able to lengthen his appointment anyways, by asking more questions about his other work, and discussing editing as a crucial part to producing decent writing. Being able to talk him through his obvious resistance was intriguing, most of the appointment I was worried he was just rushing to go, and my mentor showed me how you can curb this sort of resistance.