Today I was scheduled to give a tutoring session as apart of my Teaching and Writing class. Before class, I was nervous about tutoring someone. My main concern was hoping that I knew enough information about tutoring so that I could help my tutee the best way I can. However, once the professor gave us a general understanding of what type of students we will be tutoring and a few refresher ideas about what to do, I felt a little better.
It was a pleasure to meet my tutee. For privacy sake I will cal her Sandra. Sandra’s first language is not English. She appears to be very hardworking and organized. Upon starting the lesson, she had all her documents neatly organized and she was ready to work.
After greeting Sandra in the classroom, I began the tutoring session by asking Sandra how was her day, she responded by saying “good…even if it is bad you can’t say that it was bad…right?”. I paused and responded by saying, “it depends, being optimistic is always a good thing.” We quickly began working on the CATW practice exam.
The first thing I did was read the assignment. Skipping over the words I didn’t understand myself, I hoped that she wasn’t going to ask me what those words meant. I continued to read through the material and upon completion I said, “Okay, let me see what you have here.” Sandra showed me her work and I began reading over paragraph one. After reading through one paragraph and noticing very few mistakes, I decided not to read silently to myself anymore. I thought that reading to myself would take up too much valuable time. I therefore, had her read her first paragraph aloud. Before she began, I said, “a way for a writer identify their mistakes is reading over their piece of writing slowly. Ask yourself does it make sense?”. She said, “ok” and began reading her paragraph.
While going through her piece of writing I noticed several key things. The first thing I noticed was that she was engulfed with many rules of which she held to very tightly. For example, “we are not supposed to use ‘I’ in an essay”. After clearly stating that for this essay it was perfectly fine to use ‘I’, she still held tight to what she believed. I’m not sure if the reason why she hesitated was because she didn’t trust the information that I was giving her, so I looked at the practice CATW article and underlined the part of the directions that states that you have to use personal experience. Holding so tight to her rules also caused Sandra to write sentences that had nothing to do with the subject. I explained to her that it is okay to let go some of the rules she knows because in the CATW they are looking for specific things. She also seemed to be very focused on the subject/verb agreement and other grammar rules. I explained to her after about the third time she pointed out the grammar rules that I haven’t studied the grammar rules, I just know something is wrong by the way it sounds. However, while subject verb agreement and other grammar rules play a small part in passing, I didn’t want her to focus on getting those things right. I told her we were going to focus on the specific things that will help her pass the test, like making sure she has a summary, author‘s main ideas, etc.
I also noticed that Sandra imitates the exact style of the papers and or books that she reads. While imitating format is a good thing (e.g. an essay should start with an introduction and end with a conclusion), imitating style may cause problems. In an another example, Sandra tries to adopt an advanced writing style. However, because she does not know the complete technique, the reader is left confused. At the end of her essay, she mentioned to me that her short sentences was supposed to be like the short and powerful sentences that was in the CATW practice exam. What she achieved was not a replica of what she saw. Because Sandra lacked technique, which comes through experience, I read those sentences and was very confused. She explained to me what she was trying to do and I thought for a minute. Since we were out of time, I told her that, that was a skill that could be learned.
Besides the fact that Sandra holds tightly to rules and imitates writing styles without having a complete understanding, Sandra exhibit’s a few structural problems. Sandra had good ideas but they were not organized well. Instead of restructuring and organizing the entire piece at one time trying to figure out what should go where, I decided to work with what she had on the paper. I did not change her paper to fit my ideas of what I think a CATW should look like but using her ideas and formats working one paragraph at a time. For example, I explained to her what a topic sentence was. Then I asked her if the current topic sentence was appropriate for the paragraph. She responded, “No”. I then asked what is this paragraph mainly about. She gave me a response. I noticed that her topic sentence was in the middle of the paragraph, so I asked her, “which one of these sentences do you think should be your topic sentence”. She read through the paragraph and chose the right one. I was so excited that she understood what I had just explained to her and I said, “that is exactly right! Okay lets move it to the top”. She smiled and moved the sentence to the top.
As the time passed, the tutoring session seemed to be moving a good speed. We managed to finish the entire essay with one minute to spare. And with that last minute, Sandra, wanted me to work on another CATW practice article that she already had in her bag. I told her that our tutoring session was over but if she needed help, she could go to the writing center and they could help her with her CATW. She asked if they would help her even if she didn’t have the actual essay and I told her yes. “You can come to the writing center when you have an essay, when you need ideas on how to start an essay and when you know what you want to write in your essay but can’t seem to put it into words”. She responded, “wow”. And we both smiled.
Sandra was very focused and hardworking and when she pulled out the second CATW practice exam, it really showed me that she really wanted to pass this test. It was at that point I decided to give her my email address. I decided that we will work on trying to pass this exam together. If I give it my best and she gives it her best, I can only hope that she will pass. However, if she doesn’t pass I will know that I did my best teaching her some writing skills that would benefit her in the future.
