11/1 Response

During my tutoring session this past Monday I had three appointments with no cancellations. During the first session, I had a student come into the RWC with a finished draft and she wanted me to review her essay for a multicultural film class. In her essay, she contrasted two films and the roles played by the female protagonists in them, since she wanted to sole focus on grammar I decided to read her essay aloud to her. Her paper was well written and only had a few sentence structure errors for which I made suggestions along the way. In the interim of reading I also review her sentence structure and made sure her sentences were coherent. This student's paper was very well written and turned out to be the shortest session of my day.

In my second appointment, I had a freshman student taking Introduction to World Religions, the class was prompted to visit a different religious service than their own and write about the two sects comparing and contrasting the religious practices. My student, who was raised Catholic, attended a Jewish service at a synagogue. When the student first came in I asked about the prompt and about his religious upbringing to get a feel for how his paper would be, luckily I went to a catholic high school and so I was able to make suggestions through his essay on Catholic religious practices that we were both familiar with. After asking him about his main concerns for his paper, it was clear to me that he wasn't really sure what he was asking help for. Since it was such a short essay I read it aloud.  I started with asking him to identify his thesis statement for me so that I could use it as reference for the rest of his information and make sure his thesis matched his paper. He wanted to discuss both the architecture of the synagogue as well as the difference in how the services were run such as music, time allotment and clothing. The student did a great job explaining how Jewish services are held but I noticed that he didn't mention how they different from his own Catholic identity and that is what it focused on. We decided to shorten and rework his body from two large paragraphs two four. In this way he could effectively organized the differences in each religion and dedicate a space to thoroughly unpack each sect.  After this session I felt confident in the student that he better understood the prompt and had enough notes from our session to go back and rework his essay.

In my last session, I had a student who wrote a 10-page on the Somalian Civil War and its international effects. This student who had used his own relatives as a first person source described in great detail both how the Civil War was started and how it negatively affected multiple tribes in Somalia. I wasn't too familiar with the Somalian War so before going through the paper I asked him to explain it to me briefly so I had some background in his paper. He wanted to make sure that each of his transitions in his paper flowed and since it was ten pages I did not have enough time to thoroughly read through all of it. I read the beginning and ending of each paragraph and asked him to explain the goal of each paragraph so that I could see if his ideas were coherent. This student had a knack for posing questions as his topic sentences and then answering that same question in the next sentence as his paragraph opener and so we reworked that method. I also explained MLA format because he had page headers but no works cited page. I showed him how to crate a Works Cited age though MS Word.  Overall I think my sessions went very well. The reading aloud has been a great resource for students because I feel like many people don't and they are able to find errors that would be disguised otherwise. My observation with freshman has been that they are unfamiliar with MLA formatting and the Purdue website helps a lot also.