I have had many great tutoring sessions so far this semester. Many of them have been extremely rewarding and we accomplish a great deal. However, i have had encounter two major problems.
Problem 1: Ignorant of the Basics
I had one student that walked in appearing lost, nervous and confused. I immediately felt bad for him. He told me that he had to write a paper analyzing The Fall of the House of Usher. He asked me what i thought he should write for his thesis. He told me what he thought the theme for the paper should be and asked if i thought he was correct. However, I have never read that story and could not tell them if he was on the right track. It was hard for me because he had absolutely nothing for me to work with. Yet, i did not want to turn him away because he was so confused. He did not understand what a thesis was or the difference between summary and analysis. Instead of helping him with his actual paper, I explained to him what the difference between a summary and analysis was and how to construct a thesis. I genuinely think i helped him. He wanted me to google the plot of the story for him and go from there. However, i think teaching him the basics will help him in the long run and he seemed to be happy with the session as well.
Problem 2: Content
Last week I had a student who was a nursing major. She asked me for help on the content of the paper and said she was confident on her grammar and sentence structure. I had literally no idea about her topic (medical assisted suicide). Instead of telling her what information was wrong or right I had her read her paper out loud. We talked about what aspects of the paper were redundant and unnecessary. We talked about we're she may need to have sources to back up her stance. I surprised myself in this session because my immediate thought was that i could not do anything to help this student. Yet, i was able to help her in multiple ways just my reading it with her.
Honestly, i was going to complain about these two situations when i began to write this blog. However, as i was remembering the actual sessions i realize that they we're rewarding and we actually did get something accomplished (even if it wasn't exactly what the student was asking for).
MORAL: Tutoring sessions can take you somewhere you never thought you would go and that can be a beautiful thing.
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Katie, I like how you went with your instincts with these two sessions. In the first situation you describe, I tend to agree with you on "the basics." It seems like you tried to help the student get started in a different way than simply telling him what his thesis statement might be for that particular short story. Instead, you tried to impart a skill which might serve him well for the duration of the essay -- summary vs. analysis. After all, even if we help to craft a very nice thesis statement for a tutee, we cannot consider the thesis alone to spontaneously create a strong essay. I also like how you used italics to separate your analysis/afterthoughts from your reiterating the events themselves. Very nice post.
ReplyDeleteThis is so super thoughtful. I enjoy, specifically, how it highlights the value of an open-ended conversation/learning experience. Letting the session take participants where it will go (more and less) naturally. At the same time, (I forget who said this sorry), someone said today that it is also useful to be less natural and interrupt a sessions' more ecological movement to take into consideration an aspect of a paper (like if a writer brought in a literacy narrative but was assigned a research paper) to talk (sensitively) with the visiting writer about the ways that text does not necessarily meet an assignments objectives. Balance and kairos seem especially important things to take into consideration, then, in this regard.
ReplyDeleteI, too, enjoyed the use of italics it was a thoughtful formatting/content move!