Throughout my tutoring experience I have learned that people have different issues when it comes to writing a paper. The students I tutored had different problems that needed to be worked on. The first tutee didn’t have enough information in her paper and the second had way too much information and didn’t meet the task. My last tutor had great ideas but didn’t know how to put it on paper. Though they were difficult issues, using the skills I have learned in the teaching writing class, I was able to help these students successfully.
The first student I was tutoring didn’t seem to have many issues on her paper. She just needed more details. She told me her assignment was about the red and blue pills in the movie The Matrix. She had very good ideas, but she had to give more details. I went one by one with each sentence and asked her to explain in some. When she explained, I told her to write it down. With that, I used the method of twenty questions. She developed questions and then she answered them. I told her all the things she wrote down, she can use in her paper. She also mentioned at one point that she did not remember the movie too much. I told her to either watch the movie again, or to watch the part of the blue and red pills to refresh her memory. She said it would be a good idea because once she sees the movie again, she can write more details and remember the names of the characters.
After many questions and answers from the tutee, I checked her grammar. It was great except she used the comma frequently; even at times she didn’t need them. I showed her when to use the comma in certain situations. The way I knew my tutoring was successful was because at the end she asked if I would see her again. She said I was very helpful and knows what to do with paper with my guidance.
My second student was the opposite of my first. She had so many ideas; we had to cut some of them out. I asked her for her assignment and she gave me a passage she had to summarize and give her own ideas to. The passage was about fast food restaurants and how convenient it is to people of low income. In the second and third paragraph, it specifically talked about McDonalds and the super size meal. It was an interesting article.
After I read the article I read her paper. Overall, the paper was very good. The only thing was that she used a lot more examples of her life experience rather than summarizing the passage. Although I think giving your own example is great, the assignment was to summarize the passage, so I took the initiative to helping her summarizing the passage. I went through the article and had her talk about each paragraph. I asked her from her own words what she thought it was about. I can tell she was thinking too hard because she was worried she would be wrong. After seeing that I told her to just free-write after each paragraph what she thought it was about. She wrote a lot of good ideas and we converted them into a paragraph that summarized the article.
I then went over the paper with her and took out sentences that were irrelevant to the article. After that I checked her grammar and I can tell she had trouble with plural, singular, and possessive words. I helped her with that. After we finished I asked her if she needed any more help. I told her she did great and then she said it was great working with me. I thought the whole experience was great. She wasn’t too hard to work with and her paper was not hard to improve. The reason I knew this was successful was because she explained what she was going to do when she was to type it up on her blog. She said that because of my help she feels her paper is much better and makes more sense.
In my third tutoring experience, I had the same student I had to tutor the first time. She completed the assignment she had with me. I looked over that assignment and realized she used a lot of my advice and ended up with a very good paper. She had other assignments she needed help on and I helped her out with all of them. She had an assignment to write a summary on a movie. She explained the movie to me and then showed me what she wrote about it so far. She basically needed more details but not as much as the paper she did before. She told me she used my techniques on writing this paper. She also had to do another assignment in which she has to talk about her place in the class. She had to write about what she has learned, what she wants to learn and her comfort level in the class. She said she wrote one before so I told her to go back to that paper and use it as a guide to write the one she has to do for class now. She used it and it helped her out a lot.
My last tutoring experience was with an eng 102 student. This student was really confused with his professor’s corrections. I also realized that his professor had made several wrong corrections. However, I felt I had to help him write the paper the way his professor would like it. His assignment was to write a summary on the novel The Doll. He wrote a really good summary, but he had trouble wording out things, staying in the present tense, and he had a lot of run on sentences. We went over the paper and reworded the words that did not fit in. First I would ask him to explain what he meant and told him to write down those explanations. I then told him to use those explanations as part of his paper. He wrote a sentence using a semi colon in which the second part was not a complete sentence because it didn’t have a subject and it didn’t make sense. After that we moved on to the sentence structuring and grammar. At first he didn’t feel like he had run on sentences so I read the sentences out loud with him. As soon as we both read them out loud, he realized they were run on sentences. The strategy of reading aloud seemed affective because when reading one’s work aloud, they can pin point the mistakes by speaking them. We corrected them and moved on to making everything in the present tense. He kept saying how frustrated he was with the professor, but I quickly changed the topic back to the paper. This situation I can relate to one of the videos we’ve seen earlier in the semester that showed bad behavior in tutees and how the tutors handled them.
In my tutoring experience I have learned that we are teaching standard, not proper English. I have to understand that the people I am tutoring come from different cultural backgrounds and writing has different rules and methods in other places other than the United States. I also have learned that I will encounter tutees that come from different living environments and economic statures and that will sometimes reflect on their work. I have had tutees that were working parents and also go to school. In the Kozol reading I have learned that because of the differences of people and cultures, I have to learn to be flexible and understand where they are coming from.
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