Tutoring Session #2

In this session there was a male tutor and he had 2 students. This tutor thought himself as an expert, seeing as he thought his way was always best, and that whatever these writer wrote was wrong. Sitting in this session, I was very uneasy just by looking at his demeanor. He never smiled, or greeted the students pleasantly. He had a condesending look on his face the entire time, like the students were here wasting his and their time. The first thing he did was turn to the male student, and asked for his paper. Usually the tutor would read both papers first, and start working with the writer that had a more advanced paper, but I didn't find that to be a red flag. He never asked what was the paper about, or what he had to do, he just read it and started to give his comments. The first thing he asked the male writer was, "Where is your topic?" Before he could say anything, the tutor said that he sure he has in 'there somewhere', and time is pressing. He told the male writer to put a star next to anything he had a question about, while he worked with the other student.

This other student was a female, and what she was working on, I don't know because he never asked her. In these sessions I cannot speak, so I couldn't even ask her what was the assignment. For this part of the session, he was a little harsh towards the female writer. She would ask him a question, and he never gave concrete advice. He repeated what the text was saying, and dealt with Lower Order Concerns like grammar and spelling, when she was clearly asking for help with thing like: thesis, sentence structure and citation help. He would show her where the evidence is and then explain it, and have her write in his explanations. By this, I was horrified because I really couldn't understand how well he mus have thought this was going. When he went back to the other student, he didn't even give her an activity to do. He basically told her to write in all his ideas, and that was it for her. She left with this scowl on her face and was so upset, she didn't even stay until the session was over. Although he wasn't very hands on, he was more focused on the male student than the female student. And when all was said and done he turned to me and said, "If they just put in the stuff I tell them to, they will be fine." SIR WHAT?! This clearly wasn't a productive session, and both writers looked very unhappy when they left, and to be honest, I don't blame them.

Tutoring Session #1

In this tutoring session, there were 2 girls. The tutor came in and sat us down, but first she asked the girls if they were comfortable having me in the room. She started off with a student that had an ENG 102 paper, which touched on apple pickers. The tutor working with her was very attentive, and she sat close to her, giving her one on one help. Reading her paper, she doesn't tell her whats wrong with it, or if it needs any fixing, but she asks her questions, that makes her explain. It makes the student talk more, and when she explains it out loud she hears her mistakes and understand what needs fixing. After she figures out what needs fixing, then the tutor finds a way to help her fix the issue. As she read the paper, she laughed a little - making the writer very calm and relaxed. After this she tells the writer of that paper to look at her paper, and highlight any problem areas she thought needed fixing.

The next student came in with an explanation of a poem. She wrote a very very long explanation for her English 101 class, that didn’t contain a thesis, the thesis was more of a paragraph explaining her thoughts and ideas. The tutor explained to her that the thesis is one sentence, and that it comes at the bottom or the middle of the paragraph. She also explained that the thesis is the answer to the question that your professor asked for your paper. The tutor started asking her questions like: “What is the most memorable part of this poem? “How does it make you feel?” “Why do you think the author wrote this?” By asking these questions, the writer was able to form her own thesis.

The tutor was very alert and showed interest in what the students were saying. She didn’t put their ideas down, but she helped them create a better, more concise paper out of them. The one thing I liked about her session is that, while asking questions she never gave them the answer. She let them come to the answer themselves, and if it wasn’t correct then she would address it. This was a very effective session, the students left feeling very satisfied, and one even said she was going to come back the next day for help with another class.