My First Time Tutoring

            After my first time tutoring I realized that this isn’t as easy as it looks. Nerves are running and adrenaline is pushing throw your body and you’re thinking to yourself I really don’t want to mess this up. People typically in human nature tend to feel nervous throughout life when experiencing anything for the first time. The objective is to not let those nerves get the best of you and to focus on the task at hand.

            In my first experience tutoring a lot of thoughts ran through my head. I wanted to do the best I could which in a way made me very unfocused. My tutee and I introduced ourselves at first and then decided to get down to business. I chose to stick to simple strategies that I’ve learned in past weeks through readings and class discussions and even from what I’ve observed in my four sessions at the tutoring center. The tactics I used were to stick with the HOCs (high order concerns) and to leave all spelling errors till the very end. I quickly discussed the objective of the paper that was due with the tutee and then asked him simply what his thesis was. The advice I gave him was to “always have a strong thesis statement, and have the evidence to support it”. This student had an issue with using quotations so I chose to skim through the article with him. He had a couple quotes in his writing but they were a little bit out of context. His main issue was his structure and the order of his ideas. We then took a separate sheet of paper and wrote down all the ideas that he had about the topic in bullet form. In doing so we were able to get a clearer understanding of what he wanted/had to say on the topic. After doing so, we put together a strong thesis statement and organized the order of which he wanted to put his ideas. Finally we concluded by restating our thesis and main ideas and tried to leave the reader in quench for more.

            As can be seen, we are all human and even tutors can be nervous and lost sometimes even if they are the ones there to help. By getting comfortable and sticking to what I know and have learned I was able to help this student and making improvements into his work. My goal through this entire experience was to leave this student with something that they could keep with them for the future and to have him learn something more than what he expected to. By showing him how to focus on structure and a strong thesis, as well as teaching him what High Order Concerns and Low Order Concerns were I felt more accomplished than just simply helping him and fixing only one paper. 

Tutoring Do's and Dont's

Tutoring Do’s and Dont’s

            A lot of things come with trying to help someone. People come to certain people for advice, weither it be educational, financial or even social advice. Tutoring in my opinion is a very similar concept. There are many strategies and ways to go about tutoring someone. One would say it is situational as how we spoke about people having different ways of getting advice in our everyday lives. To me when it comes to tutoring it is very obvious what to do and what not to do, but the key is how you do it.

            There are many do’s and dont’s when it comes to tutoring, but first I want to start with what to do and how to do it. When it comes to tutoring the main thing to do is to realize what the High Order Concerns are. We have to focus on what’s important and how we are going to go about fixing the issue. Examples of a High Order Concern are things like no thesis, or not having any/enough evidence to support a certain argument, leaving the readers confused not understanding whets going on. The main thing we have to stress is to not focus on things like spelling and grammar, even though those things will need to be fixed eventually. When noticing the issues of a paper after revising it once personally, it is important to ask the tutee what was the main point they were trying to get across, and what evidence did they use to support it. The main thing in any paper is to have a strong thesis and even stronger evidence that supports it and our job as a tutor is to make sure that the tutee does that very thing. Also we must try to give the tutee some confidence about their writing. The way of doing so is by talking to them about what they did well and what their strong suites are, but we should never give them false praise or tell them what they have written is perfect because that won’t benefit them in any way, which brings me to what not to do when it comes to tutoring.

            There are even more things that you absolutely cannot do when it comes to tutoring compared to the things we should do. The main and most important of them all in my opinion is focusing on Low Order Concerns, such as spelling, grammar etc. besides that point there are six other things that a tutor must stay away from. Those six things are cheerleading, correcting errors, therapy, using ownership, being an expert, and responding too late. All these concepts are pretty much self explanatory but by breaking them down one by one we can see the true issue behind each. The first issue is cheerleading; we must not give the tutee false praise and be there just to make the tutee feel better. Our job is to give constructive criticisms that well help/support the tutees into becoming better writers. The second issue was correcting; by simply correcting spelling and grammar errors we avoid the main issues and what needs to be fixed in the students writing. Therapy simply is what it means. You are not there to be the tutees therapist and to hang out with them while talking about things outside of the paper, you are both there to focus on the task at hand and it’s on the tutor to set the tone on how the session will go. Using ownership is basically saying you are there to help, not to do the work. Tutees catch a tendency to expect the tutor to fix and do all the work but what well would that do? It must be a learning experience, which in my opinion goes with being an expert; neither the student nor the tutor are experts and must work by using the basics and fixing the main/obvious issues. Lastly is responding too late; if you can’t respect the tutees time and be considerate knowing that they have other things to do and have to get their work done by a certain time. Their work does not revolve around your schedule.

            As can be seen, there are many do’s and dont’s with tutoring, but our job as tutors is to utilize the basics of what we’ve learned and to install that into our tutees. By focusing on the main issues and not drifting off in the many ways that we can when it comes to our “dont’s” we will be successful in assisting whoever it is that needs help. By sticking with the main/High Order Concerns we will always direct the tutees towards a well written paper and also open their eyes for more papers to come.

Understanding Sondra Pearl

There are many important aspects when it comes to Sondra pearls article “Understanding Composing.” To me the most important contribution in this article to me was her take on Projective structuring. Projective structuring is defined as rereading bits of previous discourse as well as reusing key words that relate to the topic, particularly when the writer is stuck. Sondra Pearl interperates it as taking an outside view from your paper and thinking outside of it in a third person point of view to see what you can change/improve on in your paper. Projective structuring is not an issue, it’s a great teaching tactic, however it sometimes causes big confusion and drifts writers away from their own personal thoughts and feelings. The main issue with it is when a writer takes that structure and only focuses on that but wonder away from talking about what they would actually like too because they think it’s best to stick with what they were taught. As Sondra Pearl states, the reader starts to question themselves with statements like “is what I’m writing correct?” and “does it conform to the rules I’ve been taught?” In my opinion that is a major issue in a lot of students writing. What I interpreted from what she was stating was that sometimes writers avoid writing about what they feel. Instead they are too paranoid on what others would think and focus on the main structure that was given to them because that’s what they think will give them the best paper possible. In reality a mixture of both is what they need. Otherwise if everyone stuck with the same structure on a topic, everyone’s paper would be the same and it wouldn’t make their personal paper unique. Which I personally think is the receipt for a successful paper and a unique thought.

Anything can happen at any moment part 2....Reposted blog

            It was a beautiful September morning. The weather was still a little warm but a bit chilly because fall was right around the corner. The sun was out and shining as bright as ever. It was nothing but a regular school day for me. I was in the 5^th grade and we had just started school. I was at a new school this year because my family moved and as a 9 year old you don’t really keep in touch with your old friends, so I was on my own. As the last year of elementary school, I had a lot of catching up to do and everyone already knew each other except for the new kid that just moved here. The only time people would speak to me was when they had a math problem they had trouble with, or if they needed a pen or pencil.

Sooner than later, things started to pick up for me though. I was a pretty good basketball player at an early age, and sports opened me up to new people and new friends. I finally made a couple of friends and it looked like the year was going to go great. On this specific day, things were different though and I would realize this later on in my day. We just got back from lunch and me and my friend Michael just got back to our class room and wouldn’t stop talking about the basketball game we just played as we took our seats. I took out my notebook and wrote my header on the top of the page. Name, Joseph Atala…Date, September 11^th 2001.

 “RING RING…Hello? Ok…Michael you’re going home” said Miss Redman. Miss Redman was my 5^th grade teacher and I can still say till this day for some apparent reason she really didn’t like me. She was this old wrinkly lady with red hair and an angry look on her face almost majority of the time. A phone call was made to our classroom and Michael was going home. I thought to myself great, the only person I really talk to was leaving and now what am I going to do? Michael got his stuff together and went home and Miss Redman decided to get back to class.

“RING RING…Hello? Ok…Stacy you’re going home! This was the second person to go home in a matter of five minutes but this was nothing new and Miss Redman decided to get back to class once again. “RING RING…Hello? Ok…another phone call was made for someone to leave and now things were getting weird. Before I knew it in a matter of 30 minutes it was me and two other kids left in a class of 25. Something very strange was going on and the two other kids and I had no idea what was going on. Miss Redman was on the phone and left us to play games on the computers in the back. She then started breaking down into tears and another teacher walked in to comfort here. I had no idea why she was crying but my initial thoughts were, wow she actually cries? Something really strange was going on.

We had an early dismissal from school and luckily I lived only a block away from school so I walked back and I saw ridiculous amount of traffic on the way. I walk through my front door put my bag down lay on the couch and turn on the TV. Every single channel had the same thing on and it was the news showing that an airplane had crashed into the twin towers. Immediately I was shocked and really scared because of the fact that my dad works in Manhattan. This was one of the scariest moments of my left as I was home alone and had no one explain to me anything. I was confused and worried about the many lives that were in that building.

Finally my parents got home and told me what happened and it was one of the saddest things I have ever heard of. It was a long quite night and no one wanted to speak. I found myself going to sleep early just wanting this day to be over. The next day I went to school and we had a long announcement and moment of silence for the people who died. It was a long depressing day and my friend Michael came into school late that day with tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong (Besides the obvious facts of what happened the day before) he responded to me “my dad died” and broke down into tears. For the first time in my life I was speechless and couldn’t even say anything if I tried. From that moment on I finally realized and understood death and how anything can happen at any given moment which leaves a scare in me till this day. This was defiantly the most memorable day of the 5^th grade for me and one of the most memorable days throughout my life as well as my life in school period. Feeling that kind of confusion not knowing what happen and my best friend’s father dying made this one of the most emotional and scary days of my school career and it will never be forgotten.   

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