Reflection 11/13

This week I did not have to tutor in the RWC due to the holiday. However, I just have a few things I wanted to discuss regarding my least few sessions.

Last week, I had dealt with a student who did not come in with a rubric. I asked her to explain the project to me and she simply said, “Just a research paper on anything.” I knew there was probably more to the rubric, but she kept saying “research paper.” Instead of wasting more time pressing for details that she was unwilling to give, we started to read her paper aloud. In the session, we discussed various things regarding her citations and also sentence formatting. Towards the end of the appointment, probably five minutes left or less, she said, “Well, I have to do an annotated bibliography.” I was livid. We had wasted the entire appointment on this “research paper” when she had to do an annotated bibliography. Basically, her entire paper was done incorrectly. What do I do in situations like that?

Another question, which I had briefly mentioned in my reflection last week, was how do I politely tell students to LEAVE? I say our session time is up and that they will do well, but all of my tutees keep talking and not moving. What are some polite things to say to them to get them to leave? I feel weird saying my next appointment is here when, in fact, I have no idea whether the next person is here. I also don’t want to be pushy because I want the student to want to return to the RWC in the future.

Finally, I was wondering if in class we can do “pretend” tutoring sessions? Like have one of us bring in a rough draft of something and have another student go over it with us. We could even do that with our papers for Project 3. I know we’re doing a lot of stuff to help us with Project 3, but I am trying to intern for the RWC next semester and having these practice sessions with each other would be extremely beneficial. That way we can all share our ideas with each other and give advice as to how a session should be.

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.

11/09

My first appointment on Monday was with a student working on a cultural ethnography paper, one of the papers I’ve already worked with in the Reading Writing Center. These students are all required to come to the RWC and all have forms that I have to fill out and sign/date for their teachers proving they came in. Despite the requirement though, I found this tutee to be specifically engaged, my appointment after her never showed, so I offered her the time to continue going over the paper and she was eager too. Most of the issues with the paper were very basic, some MLA formatting issues, and an excess of background information. Working on this paper with other students was helpful when approaching hers, as I had a better idea of the expectations of it, and was able to explain those expectations to her. There were some structural issues, and we talked about the ‘funnel’ (?) idea when organizing papers, which was helpful. She also needed to work on strengthening her topic and ending sentences, as well as her conclusion. I did think she took a lot away from the session, but she did work on her computer while we discussed it, and I assume she tried to edit her paper as rapidly as she could while we talked, as opposed to thinking about a lot of it herself.

            My next appointment was very different, I didn’t know what to expect because the appointment sheet online was filled out horribly incorrect. She was an International French Graduate Student, and the language barrier did pose a small issue, as we needed to communicate slowly and be a little repetitive on both ends to understand each other well. Otherwise, she came prepared with a discussion board post draft, and the main issue was her having trouble translating what she meant in French to coherent and equivalent English. It was certainly difficult at times, but with the help of my mentor who tutors alongside me, we were able to work at the rough spots. Overall it went well, but it was one of my more difficult sessions, I do feel more prepared for international students after this session.

11/11/15

I did not tutor today because of the holiday.  Instead, I'm just going to talk about my fears going into tutoring and how I'm dealing with them.  I'm a pretty shy person initially, so my main fear going into tutoring was that I wouldn't be able to connect with the student or that I wouldn't have anything to say.  When I was co-tutoring, my mentor always introduced me and started the conversation with the student.  It was kind of hard imagining myself doing that, and to be fair, I did a pretty terrible job of it the first time.  In my first tutoring session, the student was planning on turning in the paper in just a couple of hours.  She seemed pretty anxious to get out of there quickly, so it was awkward and hard for me to build a connection with her.  In the last couple of tutoring sessions, I've had students who are just looking to brainstorm.  For me, this has made it easier to build a connection.  The students are literally coming there to just talk about their project.  Most of the time it doesn't really matter what I say, as long as I can get them talking, the ideas start flowing.  I've found myself saying, "well I don't know if that really helps..." in my tutoring sessions, and every time each student has replied, "honestly just talking about my project has given me several more ideas than I walked in with."  This is encouraging.  I've realized that I don't have to understand their project the first time they describe it to me.  The more questions I ask about it, the more they have to explain it.  Normally, this ends up with them understanding their project even better just from explaining it to me.  I've also really been impressed with some of the projects the students come in with.  A lot of these projects are very creative and they really bring out passion within the students.  I've met some really knowledgeable students who just needed stimulation.  All it takes is a little prodding and questioning for these students to open up.  When they leave happily, I relax a little more each time.

Week 11/6 Response

            Tutoring this week was slightly easier than it usually is as all three of my tutees brought nearly finished drafts to be reviewed this week. I find nearly finished drafts to be the easiest to work with because usually the writer has had some time to reflect on their writing to have more of an idea of what they want to talk about in tutoring. Most of the time tutees are more aware of problem areas after they’ve had to review their writing at least one other time.

            The first student I tutored this week was working on her second draft of a very open essay. The teacher had essentially assigned them to talk more in depth about a subject the class had talked about. The essay was honestly on the side of poorly written as it contained numerous redundancies and was very confusing as far as organization went. I started with the redundancies by asking the writer what they had intended to say in certain paragraphs and then pointing out details that could be more useful than any repeated points were. Then I went back and helped the student outline a more coherent essay organization and brainstorm a more strongly worded thesis.

            The second person I tutored had a group project that she wanted me to look at her contribution for. This essay was very well written already and only needed to have certain sentences cleared up slightly. Overall this was an easy essay to critique and required very little to be fixed.

            The third student I tutored this week also had a very well written essay that needed very little to be looked at. The few suggestions I felt I needed to make were to break up a few run on sentences and to add a little punctuation to help clarify a few sentences that really needed commas.

            One last thing I noticed across the board for my tutees was a lack of confidence in citations. As this is something I share I felt it was important to bring up in these reflections. I directed all students to Perdue OWL and went through their citations with them using the website to show them how it works. 

Week of 11/6

            This week my tutee, Andres Elovic, came in with a very strong paper that he wrote for his nutrition class about food choices, nutritional value, how frequent people eat and the quantities they consume, and how societal, cultural, and historical factors all play into the decisions we make regarding what we eat. We fixed a few grammatical errors and typos throughout, but the writing content and structure of his paper was phenomenal.

            Andres began his paper with a very strong thesis, and followed the excellent introduction with paragraphs making clear and specific points, each point contributing to the overall answer to the main idea of why we eat the foods we eat. Andres used personal examples, such as his childhood in Miami, and how the foods he ate were different in comparison to his friend’s diet, who also lived in Miami. He used this example to solidify his point that even if you come from the same region as someone else, your dietary patterns could rely completely on your upbringing and your family-resulting in many different cultural ways of eating-all condensed in one small region.

            Andres had a few questions about formatting, and was mainly worried about grammatical errors. The fact that the writing content of his paper was already so finalized and polished gave us much more time to focus on sentence structures and grammatical errors, making the tutoring session run much more smoothly. Andres was open to all of my suggestions, which was wonderful. He made me feel like he was happy with the overall product of his paper, which is always a huge relief after any tutoring session.

            Andres plans to read over his paper a few more times to catch any last minute, minor errors before submitting it for grading on Sunday. I felt confident after our tutoring session that his paper would receive a very high grade, as Andres gave himself plenty of time for the polishing and revision process, and is already such a strong writer to begin with. Tutoring Andres was truly a fantastic experience, and I look forward to more sessions as fantastic as this one.

11/6 Reflection

This week at the Reading and Writing Center was definitely one of the most challenging. The two students I met with were both originally from different countries. The first girl I met with was a freshman student who was in the new composition course for freshman. She was from in Britain, but now lived in America. She had somewhat of an accent, which was difficult to understand when she read her paper aloud to me. When she started reading her essay, I knew I should have read it instead. I had a very difficult time hearing her pronounce words, for she spoke super fast and mumbled as well. I began to read to myself at that point because I was having a hard time comprehending what the essay was explaining. She ended up having a lot of issues with citations and also she lacked an introduction and conclusion. Originally, I had asked her for a rubric, which she lacked. So then I had her explain to me what she had to do for the assignment. She said “just any type of research paper.” I knew there was more to it, but she obviously didn’t want to say. At the end of our session with like five minutes left, she told me she had to do a annotated bibliography and I was mad. I had done the entire appointment assuming it was just a regular essay when it was not. And then I kept telling her her appointment was about over and she would not walk away. I am having trouble with getting students to leave appointments. Maybe you have some suggestions as to what I can say besides “your appointment is over”?

My next appointment was with a foreign exchange student who was from China. This was top three most difficult sessions for me. She spoke fluently, but she had such a thick accent I had to close my eyes and just focus on what she was saying. She said that she was journaling to work on her English skills, but she wanted her journal to be more descriptive and expressive. She explained to me that English lacks translations for Chinese words. She was such a sweet girl, but she had a difficult time understand why certain words did not make sense and was not open to using other words. That is what frustrated me the most. I need to work on communicating with foreign exchange students and maybe in class we can do a refresher because it has been a while since we did any ESL readings.