I had three half hour appointments during my shift on 10/16.

My first appointment was with a freshman who was working on an essay about benefits for veterans. I decided not to have her read the essay aloud but to skim through it myself. I found that the toughest thing was to read thoroughly enough in the short amount of time that we had to be able to offer advice. So at first I offered a complement, which was that her writing was strong and backed up with plenty of data. Then I began with a topical critique, which was that she scattered rhetorical questions throughout. I wanted to tell her to scrap them altogether but I settled with telling her that they took away from the credibility of the paper. She also had a lot of opinionated sentences thrown in without and support to back them up, so I suggested that she add more support or move them to the conclusion paragraph. We combined a couple weak paragraphs to create a stronger essay. I was pleased that she listened attentively and heeded my advice.

My second pupil was also a freshman, working on an essay for ENC1101. He had prepared an intro paragraph and the first body paragraph. This appointment felt more casual because we were able to brainstorm ideas for the rest of the essay. I think he expected me to write some sentences myself but instead I just gave him some ideas.

The third appointment was an ESL student who wanted me to work with her on grammar. As we read through the essay I pointed out the most problematic grammar mistakes that took away from the content. I thought that even more so than grammar, what  needed to be looked at was the content because she contradicted herself a lot of the time, which took away from her overall purpose, so I helped her to form one paragraph with a counterargument. She asked me if there were any grammatical errors that I skipped over because she was "only there for grammar" so I was a little offended. But I think we were able to improve her essay as a whole.

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. 

Tutoring Reflection

My first solo tutoring appointment was an ESL student whose primary language is Spanish. Her assignment was a book review for an advertising class where she had to connect various ideas presented in the book she was assigned with ideas she discussed in her class. She spent the first few minutes of the appointment explaining her assignment and stating that she was an ESL student. She mainly wanted me to look over her grammar in her assignment and showed me that she already had the first half of her assignment proofread by another tutor. I went ahead and started on the half she didn't get proofread and told her that I'll go back and look at the first half if time allowed for it. First thing I looked out for was to make sure her grammar really was an issue, and that her problem wasn't something else. After looking at the first few sentences and the number of grammar mistakes within, I realized that grammar was indeed an issue. I went ahead and marked her mistakes in the paper, explaining to her why they are mistakes and what she would need to do to fix them. Aside from spelling mistakes and odd word choices in some areas, another issue she had with grammar was the word order for some sentences. I went ahead and made note of those mistakes as well and gave her suggestions for revision on those particular sentences. As I was going through her paper, the student kept making comments on how hard it is to write in english. I assured her that while there were mistakes, her writing was still pretty coherent, and would just need to keep a few grammar rules in mind for future writing. After looking over the second half of the assignment, I went ahead and took a look at the part that was already proofread. I saw that the previous tutor had already pointed out all the mistakes. After that, the student thanked me and left.

My second appointment was a freshman who was working on her first draft of an ENC1101 paper. She explained to me that her assignment required her to pick three different advertisements and find common themes throughout those assignments. She also told me that the paper needed to be 2100 words, and that she was having trouble just reaching 1000 words as her current draft was just over 900. She even brought in pictures of the ads that she was writing about. The ads were all different Gucci advertisements, and she wanted to talk about themes of gender roles displayed within all the ads. After all was explained to me, I went ahead and took a look at her draft. One thing I noticed while reading it was that she would spend only one paragraph talking about each ad. She brought up some interesting ideas pertaining to each within each paragraph, so I told her that she can easily expand her paper by expanding on those various ideas and making them there own paragraph. I went ahead and made notes in her paper and underlined the ideas that she can expand upon. From her writing, I could also tell that the student was still relatively new to the concept of formal writing, from her use of contractions, slang terms, and personal pronouns. I asked her if she was aware of what formal writing is, and the student told me that she never heard of it before. I explained to her how academic writing is different from other forms of writing she may have been used to, and made notes in her draft where things needed to be changed in order to meet academic standards. After that, she told me that she came to the RWC because her instructor offered extra credit for doing so. She asked me if I could sign and date the bottom of her draft as proof. I signed her draft, wished her luck with the rest of her paper, and the session ended.

10/16 Response

I was extremely nervous about tutoring on my own but my mentor Clare had her shift during the same time and assured me that if she needed my help I could ask. The first appointment was a student who was the director of an international program and he needed help editing a GoFund Me Campaign page. I started out asking hime about his position and why he loved his job and what the campaign was about, he was a very enthusiastic student and was open to all my suggestions which was helpful and made the session go by smoothly. I read aloud the pitch to him and as I came to paragraphs that did not seem coherent I asked him to clarify and made suggestions about changes. We finished going over the page early and then I helped him compose a business email that asked people to donate to his cause. Later he explained to me that English is not his first language, French was and that helped me to understand a bit of his grammatical differences. I asked hi to explain the differences between Creole and English and I think that made him feel more comfortable talking to me because I was so generally interested in learning about his first language.

The second student was a freshman taking ENC1101. She was writing a paper on the dynamic of between visual rhetoric and text in women's advertisements. Her paper was well written but she wanted me to go over it to made sure it "made sense," which then I asked her to clarify what she meant. She then told me that she thought some of her paragraphs were repetitive and wanted to see anther persons perspective. Asking her again, what she wanted to gain from the session really helped me as a tutor hone in on the students needs. There were some instances where she repeated herself and so throughout my suggestions I let her write the corrections on her paper. If we came across a word that she thought she sed to much, I first asked her opinion. I think that talking the paper out with someone and really letting the student lead the session helps them to realize how they want their finish draft to sound. She had a well written piece but there some small suggestions that I think made her paper even better but I really didn't make the changes, I just asked her "what do you think a stronger word would be?" or "how does this sound aloud to you?" she would then correct her self and then I just helped to confirm as support for what she wanted.

I think a big proponent of tutoring effectively is engaging with the student as a peer, asking them about themselves and letting them guide the session, only working as a mediator between themselves and their paper to help reveal what many of the time they might already know. I believe both of the sessions went well and I can't wait to see what my other appointments will be like.

10/15 Reflection

Tutoring on my own was stressful but really fun. The first person who came in was working on his research paper for ENC 1101. He was on his final draft. He said he thought his transitions from paragraph to paragraph were weak, so I suggested we read the paper out loud together. It worked really well. Every now and then, he would recognize a little grammar error or a confusing sentence. Sometimes I had to think about how to make suggestions—like how to sound constructive instead of just saying, “make that two sentences.” That was probably the hardest part for me—not correcting him all the time. I used a trick from the girl I co-tutored with—she would say, “as a reader…” before pointing out a mistake. It’s sneaky. “As a reader, this sentence stood out to me.” The paper was about how music artists pair their sound with cover art. He had a lot of sources, but some of them were album reviews. He said his teacher disliked these sources because they weren’t from an academic source. I showed him the library website and how to find a database/article/journal. I hope that helped him.

               The second person I saw was a girl working on a paper for Hispanic marketing. She was a native Spanish speaker and said she made an appointment with me because my last name is Spanish. I was happy about that. She was concerned with her English writing. She had trouble with prepositions and prepositional phrases, pronouns, and articles. Her syntax was also a little confusing. Again, it was difficult not to just tell her what to do. One thing I found myself doing was re-writing some of her more jumbled sentences in a blank Word doc so that we could re-word it in a way that made the most sense. I think I did a good job of identifying patterns in her errors—most of them were easy to fix, but there were so many that it took a good forty-five minutes to make it through half the paper. Overall, I had a good time during these two appointments.

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.

Solo tutoring reflection- 10/14

I found tutoring by myself for the first time to be very fun. Before my sessions began I was a bit nervous. I checked to see who the students that were coming in were going to be. I was worried to be on my own mainly because tutoring is something completely new to me. Co-tutoring the past three weeks have taught me a lot but I was worried there were things I would not know going into my first few sessions. I was happy to find out that the first student coming to see me was a freshmen working on a persuasive essay. This gave me some ease because it was on a subject that I was aware of. The student came prepared and was eager to get started. She told me she had been to the writing center for this particular paper before and that she receives extra credit for coming. We went through the paper together and I was able to help her with some minor details; overall, her paper was well written and her ideas were presented in an understandable manner. 

The next student that came in was a graduate Political Science student. Because she was a graduate student, I was worried about the level of writing or the amount of information that we would have to look over. As our session began, I was pleased to find that graduate students are actually not that intimidating and they too need help with their assignments sometimes. I did feel as if there was a language barrier. The student’s primary language was Spanish; this was made obvious through her writing. The paper we worked on was to be submitted to her professor 30 minutes after our session. She was extremely happy she came to the writing center and felt that our corrections strengthened her thoughts. I think by working together we were able to find a way to better express her ideas. 

Unfortunately, my last student did not show up to her appointment but, in general, tutoring alone was a different and new experience. I look forward to working with other students the rest of the semester.