Denia's Case Study

Working at the Writing Center in LaGuardia has given me much to think about. Education like everything else has its own dominoes effect. It has made more real the challenge I will be taking on going into the education field. I learned that even though a person is at a grade level, doesn’t mean they are performing at that level. This can discourage you or motivate you to make a difference. Tutoring taught me that I care and will go that extra mile to make a difference. Although I didn’t work with different personalities, I had the pleasure of repeatedly working with the same tutee that needed a lot of help.

 I was so happy and proud to see the progress from the first session to the second. The first time we met up she had no assignment sheet; nothing written on paper; she didn’t even seem to want to be there. I had asked her what the assignment was and her response was “I don’t know something about comparing the Matrix with this dumb movie the Meatrix.” I continued to try to work with her by asking her to tell me what the Meatrix was about. I did this out of pure curiosity and to have some type of conversation going. When she was summarizing the movie, which she did quite well, I asked her if she had anything to write the main points down. That’s when she decided to tell me that their assignment was on a blog online. Luckily there was a computer in the room we were using and were able to log in. I read what she had so far which was only about a sentence. I don’t know how or why I realized that the reason she didn’t want to be there was because she did not understand the assignment. I suggested she then take out a paper and write the main points of both movies. Once she was done I explained to her that she had already done most of the assignment right there on the sheet of paper and all she needed to do was put it in sentences that made sense. I used the outlining method as per our tutoring book, so she can see the ideas she will be using and so she can see what the assignment was asking for (McAndrew and Reigstad 51). By the time our session was done she had her first paragraph done and her arguments that she would use in her body. I had also given her some techniques to get her to write like just jotting down what comes to mind when thinking of her main topic. This is called free focused writing (McAndrew and Reigstad 46). This helps the students with development, and in my opinion sticking with the topic.

The next session we had my tutee had a different assignment. I was happy to see she was more prepared and already had a draft. When I read it I was happy to see she had such great ideas in her essay. We went over the essay together by having her read it aloud. At first she refused, but I explained the purpose was so she could hear what her readers read, and be able to pick up her own mistakes. She was really concerned with her spelling and I told her to leave it for last. The main idea is to get out on paper what she wants to say, and get its structure right. When we came to certain words, which it’s spelling obstructed the meaning of her work that’s when I would ask her what she was trying to say and have her sound it out. I was so disappointed when I saw that even sounding out simple words was a challenge for her. This worries me. My tutee has to be at least 20 years old, and her reading and writing level aren’t even at a high school level. She was misspelling simple words like brother, since, advice, to, meat etc. She showed me this spelling book she carries around with her which she uses to help with her spelling. This motivated me because it demonstrated to me that she wants to improve.

We haven’t had much personal conversation, but just from listening to her speak, I don’t think English as spoken in the United States is her first language. I don’t want to make assumptions but her accent seems to be Jamaican although not very thick. This might have some influence in her spelling problem. This idea is supported and better explained by the following quote “Avoidance phenomenon is a concept that comes from studies of second language acquisition. The idea is that students who have not yet mastered a linguistic form, concept, sentence type, grammatical unit, or vocabulary word tend to avoid types of writing that put them in the position of having to produce what they find difficult” (Hayward 71). This would also explain my tutee’s problem with just being able to put something on paper.

Another contributing factor I believe has to be where she lives and the schools she went to. I read in her essay that she lives in Brooklyn by the 1 and 5 train. This isn’t the worst neighborhood but it isn't the greatest especially in terms of public schools. It is not a hidden fact that students who go to schools in underprivileged neighborhoods don’t get the same education as students who go to schools in better neighborhoods such as Forest Hills. The inequality is clear as described in this quote “New York City’s public schools are subdivided into 32 school districts. District 10 encompasses a large part of the Bronx but is, effectively, two separate districts. One of these districts, Riverdale, is in the Northwest section of the Bronx. Home to many of the city’s most sophisticated and well-educated families, its elementary schools have relatively few low-income students. The other section, to the south and east, is poor and heavily nonwhite. The contrast between public schools in each of these two neighborhoods is obvious to any visitor.” (79) Maybe the teachers teaching at these schools don’t care anymore because the pay isn’t enough to compensate for the conditions they have to work under. Maybe the teachers have given up because the parents of these students aren’t doing their part at home. Maybe it’s the lack of funding and resources the schools get. The point is here is a student who obviously wants to get an education beyond high school, and strive for greatness, and somewhere down the road the community, the education system, and her family failed her. She is now in college with great potential, but her spelling and reading skills are holding her back.

Tutoring at the Writing Center has shown me how important early education is. If our first teachers don’t put in an effort, then it only makes it harder for the student to progress, and his later teachers to teach him. Teaching shouldn’t be about financial compensation, or even recognition. Teaching is about the students. Every child should have the right to a stimulating, abundant academic experience. Where they live, their families’ financial status or educational background should have nothing to do with how much education they receive, or the quality of education they receive. Those who decide to go into the field of education should do so because they want to make a difference, and because they believe how important education is. We forget that today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, workforce, business owners and parents. If they don’t receive quality education now then we cannot expect a better tomorrow.  Our financial problems, political problems, even the inequalities that go on today, will continue strong if education isn’t made part of the solution and looked at as a priority.

Bibliography

Hayward, Nancy. "Insights into Cultural Divides."

McAndrew, Donald A. and Thomas J. Reigstad. Tutoring Writing, A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portamouth,: Boynton/ Cook Publishers, INC., 2001.

"Public Education in New York, Savage Inequalities."

Carlos' Case Study

My experience as a tutor has made me reflect on my skills, flexibility and
knowledge towards tutee’s ethnicity and background in unpredictable tutoring
sessions. My case study is a gathering of information describing my experience
with students I have worked with relating to education and identifying my
actions as a tutor to help people with their abilities and efficiency to write.
I had four sessions were a tutee’s background needed understanding to flex
critical thinking and activate chemistry to help complete their paper. Many
tutees are students in a class that are not native English speakers, some are
adults attending college, and others are attending the curriculum at their
freshmen year. My training and studying of strategies to develop thinking to
write academically has convinced me there is more understanding evolved between
me and the tutee of these sessions to find answers to questions, to dominate the
assignment given by the professor, or leave with satisfaction between me and the
tutee of each session.   

My first two tutees had similar situations with similar outcomes of progress of
each session. The first session was with a Dominican native of the island who
comprehended his assignment, and was persistent and considerate towards me when
he found out I was his tutor. The other tutee was a bus driver who was born in
the island of Jamaica and her accent was broken English. She had trouble
understanding what she needed to improve on; being the youngest in the age
difference amongst each other made me spot a felt sense of what they expected of
me to perform and be knowledgeable of; when each session proceeded, they wanted
me to examine their writing and find what weakness they must work on to complete
their assignments. When I asked questions, I was processing information of their
background, accent, English word usage, general thinking, body language and
facial expressions. They saw my ability to conducted myself with persistence and
professionalism and became more open to my feed backs and advise. With patience
and timing my determination to collaborate with both tutees made me realize the
vibe of the session, pushing both tutees to open themselves to me to communicate
and leave with satisfaction of every session.

My third tutee was a from an Asian country who is much older than me and her
English was not efficient. She did not know how to start a draft. As I offered
my help to guide her to start on her writing, she gave facial expression of
confusion when she explained to me her problems. I would find simple ways to
explain my answers to her questions. I realized by my fifth explanation, she was
asking the same question and using condensed words to explained what I just
explained to her. I felt I was not appreciated or taken serious because she
seemed to be challenging my advice. It occurred to me that she didn’t want to
fail and her perception of right and wrong held her back. I let her control her
own frustration by rereading the assignment but she could not stop worrying
preventing her from writing. I told her in order to start writing, she must
write her thoughts on paper and that there are many English words to describe
what she wants to convey. She insisted to stick to the assignment describe by
the professor which prevented her from writing. She was so persistent in writing
the paper the right way, it distance her away from her creativity and writing
ability, but I understood she was not receptive of me because of my age,
experience and position as a tutor. In Asian countries, the teacher is the only
position were someone has the most say and liable information to give to a
student, which directed me to move to assist other tutee.

My last tutoring session was with a student nurse who had a well written essay.
The student wanted to focus on her A.P.A rubric and identify errors that needed
correcting. It was difficult to examine her writing when it had no errors. when
I reread her paper, I offered to print out hand out sheets of rules and
organization of correct A.P.A instructions for her essay because I did not know
them. She seem disappointed when I told her I cannot identify her A.P.A errors.
I was hard on myself when I realized I did not have the answers to all her
questions. It was stressful for me not to find any errors in her writing because
if she did not pass her assignment, It would have reflected on me as a tutor.
When someone writing is efficient, it is more stress on me to make sure there
are no errors on the paper. For her to rely on my input pressured me to give her
feedback that had to be correct in my position.

As a tutor, I am put in position to help tutees convey what they want to create
and express in their writing. My experience as a tutor gave me a board sense of
interacting with people of diverse, social, cultural, and environmental
situations. I read the signs, gestures, and signals of the tutee to make sure we
are communicating comfortably in a session. Being a tutor helps me think
critically and develop flexibility to maneuver out of situations in social and
academic interacting, improving and expanding my learning, reading and writing
skills. In general I see being a tutor involves keen strategic thinking to help
and connect with the tutee to make the best out of the session.

Alexias' Case Study

Before this class I have never thought about tutoring and or becoming a tutor. Tutoring was something that I received for science and math when I was in high school. I could not grasp what was going on in class and I was not passing my exams. The individual one on one instruction helped me to understand what I needed to pass my exams and the class. This semester I was able to experience and observe a trained tutor help students, and then I myself, became a peer tutor.  I can proudly say that throughout this semester in class and during my observations, tutoring skills is not all I acquired from this learning experience. Tutoring students in the writing center observing and then tutoring students myself has taught me to be an extremely versatile and relatable person when it comes to tutoring, education and learning in general. By versatile I mean, being able to adapt to any person place or thing when dealing with education. What I mean by relatable, is enabling the student to understand that I know and recognize where the student is coming from.

There are so many people that are so eager to learn and become successful in life. They come to college to do just that. Everyone wants to enhance their education so they can get that high paying job and become successful. With that they can support themselves, their family and live a comfortable life. Before all that can happen, help is always needed to ensure this process. Over this class I observed four different tutors and tutoring sessions. One of my sessions I observed Oscar. He had a session with two students from the same class, which was ENG 101. The reason they were there was to receive corrections on their citations/reference page for the online articles and books they used in their papers. Another session I observed Bill. Bill is a professor here at LAGCC teaching ENG 101, 102, & 103, he also teaches at BMCC. Bill is tutoring one student that comes to him on a regular basis. In this session she came in for grammatical help with fragments and complete sentences. In a different session I oversaw Julianna. In this tutoring session she as well had two people she had to tutor. One girl needed help with her scholarship essay, and the other needed help with her research paper. And I finally observed Maria. Maria tutored two students at a time. One student had a resume that she needed revised, and checked over for format, grammatical and punctuation errors.

And the other was a long term student that she had been working with for over two years who was doing an analysis paper. On my last tutoring session, I helped a girl named Annomoyah who needed final preparation for the CATW exam she is taking tomorrow. In our session I was able to help her with many things, best as I could. The first thing we worked on was the essay she wrote which was responding to a certain passage about the nation being distracted with technology. We started correcting the essay and when I realized it did not really hit the key points that it needed to, I immediately stopped and took out the CATW material I had to better help her understand exactly what she needed to do. From there everything went extremely smooth. I explained and went over the proper structure including the introduction, body and conclusion.

The main thing I focused on was making sure she wrote more than 411 words. The way I did that was by breaking down each paragraph. I explained a thesis and what a topic sentence was and how to include them in her paper. I showed her how to underline the most important ideas in the paragraphs and use that information in her written paragraphs as her examples. I explained that she should give her opinion and uses the ideas from the paragraphs to explain her points. She got the hang of it and realized that the more she explained the more she was writing. And the more she wrote the better her essay was going to be. For the thesis, 3-body paragraphs and conclusion, I made Annoyamah find and paraphrase her topic sentences directly from the passage, and still adding her own ideas and twists to the paragraph. When it came to the conclusion I told her to sum up her essay restating her thesis. In closing, I told her to find a way to solve this problem of the nation being distracted by technology. And then explain how if this problem is not corrected how it will affect the world socially and culturally. She totally understood what I was telling her and I feel she will hopefully remember and use this strategy so she can write a “5” essay.

I know she will definitely remember this strategy that I showed her because I gave her the CATW handouts that described “5, 4, 3, 2 and 1” papers so she knows what to do and not to do tomorrow. I also helped her make a list of the details she needed to follow so she can definitely pass. When I say details I mean, her structure such as having an intro, body and conclusion, sentence clarity, and making sure she summarizes the passage. As well as giving her own experience or ideas to the paragraph. Lastly, I went over grammar and punctuation, and told her not to stress it too much, but to make sure she reads over her work so she can catch her mistakes. The most important thing I stressed to Annoyamah was to understand that she knew what she was doing because she has been writing the whole semester, among other things. My quick pep talk seemed to work because she seemed so much more confident leaving then when she came in, and that made me proud to be a peer tutor.

All of these students came to the Writing Center wanting to receive help with assignments they did not understand or do correctly or papers that needed revision. All of the tutors that I observed served a purpose and helped each student to the best of their ability. They had great tone body language, and they seemed genuinely interested in helping. They did not really use any specific tutoring strategies from the Tutoring Writing book.  This was probably because all of the students that came already knew exactly what they needed help with.  When I did my two tutoring sessions it was somewhat the same.

With my first session I worked with an Eng 99 student by the name of Paula.  Now she had a specific assignment that she wanted to work on, but she did not have a hard copy the assignment. Since she did not have her assignment, I improvised and helped her best I could with what she had to work with. I corrected and went over her first written paragraphs about the movie The Matrix, staring Keanu Reeves where she summarized the film. After that she opened up and explained to me that she was confused with the whole essay structure. So I took our time and explained that to her. I broke the structure down explaining the intro, thesis body, and conclusion. I also gave her help hints to help her when writing her future papers. I even showed her one of my old Eng 220 essay so she could see a prime example of how an acceptable essay looked.

In my second session I had a regular English class student. She needed a tutor but since all of the other tutors were taken, they let me take her. I really enjoyed our session and it was at the end when I realized that I really could do this whole tutoring thing. She just needed me to help her revise her essay and make it not so colloquial, especially when it came to how it flowed. English was her second language, and the paper was written as if she was talking to me. I revised the whole paper with her. I helped her rewrite her ideas and let her do most of the correcting with me just there for the support and final overseeing of it to make sure it was a better paper than what she came in with. We went over her grammar and entire essay structure. I pointed out what topic sentences were and gave her the option of having them in all of her body paragraphs. With this, anyone and everyone would be able to read her paper and fully understand what she was discussing. We conversed, laughed and I learned some things I did not know from her, just as she did me. In the end, she seemed really satisfied and I am really glad I was able to experience that.  This session showed me that being modest, and patient and open to anything can take you a long way. I was constantly questing myself and doubting that I was doing everything the way I was supposed to.  I really wanted to help her and have the same content feeling about her paper I would have if I saw a regular tutor. And I feel I did just that, and from that session among others, I realized why the Writing Center is so effective and is always so crowded.

During theses individual one-on-one sessions these tutors have time to either just do their job, or really try and help someone. I am figuring by the enormous amount of people that go there they are really helping these students. A lot of these tutors build relationships with these students so they feel completely comfortable and able to express whatever is on their mind. That is why so many people have favorite tutors because many of these tutors allow students to do so. These tutoring sessions are not just helping students with papers. They are teaching writing across the cultural divides. So many students are coming from different education cultures and have different backgrounds and are not the best writers, readers. But with this help they are able to understand, comprehend and improve in something that they might have been very weak in. Being able to succeed in something that you once could not is an excellent feeling, I know from personal experience.

I myself perfect, instead I feel I have gotten better over time. When I was in high school I was a great writer compared to many of my classmates. I went to high school across the street from Baisly Projects in South Jamaica, Queens.  This neighborhood was not the finest, and the school was not zoned so the students from all of the five boroughs there. The environment was challenging and there were many obstacles that I had to overcome, but I did what I had to do. I cannot say the same for many other students that went there. Half did not graduate. Kozol wrote in her essay Savage Inequalities, that “The number of students of all races who drop out between 9^th and 12^th grade, and do not return, never finish school” I can completely contest to this because I experienced it first hand. Some of my friends, and friends-friends, became statistics, and I swore that would not be me. Some people do not understand the struggle that minorities everywhere face, especially when it come to education.

Not everyone is driven, and has a supportive family to stay on top of them to make sure they succeed. I was lucky, because I had my mom, and from young she instilled great morals and values and all that focused around education.  I believe that just because I live in a poor neighborhood does not mean I have to be a protégé of it. Over the years I have learned that you have to go hard or go home. You have to be determined and focused and know what you want. You also have to understand that you have to deal with a lot to get to where you really want to be. The same thing goes for all these students that attend the Writing Center. These students are taking the necessary steps to improve their education.

 In conclusion I can say this: this tutoring experience has taught me how to be an effective tutor. When I say effective, I imply having the ability to teach and understand that you can be taught as well. A tutor should always  having the ability to relate and maybe become somewhat personal with their student. This experience actually has also made me want to teach even more, because I really loved the feeling of knowing I helped someone. Tutors have to be flexible and willing to help students that really want to be helped. Tutors are supposed to care about the intellectual and personal development of their students. To do that you have to be able to relate, and not be judgmental of them, who they are and what they might or might not know. This tutoring experience has opened my eyes to so much more than just tutoring.  I have an open mind to anything and everything and I am willing and wanting to help anyone that wants it. Education is something that anyone and everyone should get, regardless of where you come from or where you are living now. This class and the tutoring sessions that I observed have really helped me understand the entire aspect when it comes to teaching and writing as a whole. The strategies that I have learned, and the one-on-one experience I had is not just meaningful in itself. These skills and techniques will help me in my overall teaching and writing career, as well as my everyday life. McAndrew and Reigstad stated that “writing is a tool for learning” and that is so true. In essence, if you are not a versatile person, you might not excel as much as you want to with your future ventures.