Alexxx and Stephennnn

Hey guys!

We are soooo incredibly slow this week. The only student Stephen had was his usual weekly. The student brought in the prompt for his compelling question paper for enhanced writing and rhetoric 1. Stephen made the decision that brainstorming/freewriting would be the best option for the student. Here's where the genious part came in. Instead of just walking away and giving the student 15 minutes to write while Stephen sat on the couch Stephen handled it in a different way. He took his phone out and brought up the stopwatch and had the student and himself freewrite questions for 5 minutes. Since this isn't Stephen's paper, he just spent the 5 minutes thinking of questions relating to his student's topic. I thought this was really interesting. I generally let one of my student's freewrite in order to think of ideas but I usually just walk away because my student has expressed that he can't write if I'm just at my computer. I think it would be interesting to try freewriting some questions as well. It definitely adds an interesting layer to this idea of collaboration. However, I think that tutors should be cautioned to not let their own ideas sway the student's paper too much. I brought that up to Stephen and he said that he didn't just give the student his ideas, but rather asked the questions he wrote down.

What do y'all think?

Kendra&Kathryn

Hey all,

Today is Kathryn's last mentor meeting :( She has taken the next two weeks off for her sister’s graduation and for a convention. We first talked about Kathryn’s appointment this week; it was a two-hour session. She was another ESL student, who wanted to work on grammar (focusing on articles). Kathryn said that it went okay, but she was worried that she was focusing too much on grammar. I explained to her that you need to find a balance between the content and the grammar, but if the student wanted to work on grammar, then that’s their decision. Kathryn also noticed a lot of repetition and restating. This could be difficult to explain to students, but if you put it in a simple sentence like, “There are two modes of play, practice and story. The two modes practice and story…” Kathryn explained to her that she didn’t need to inform the readers of the two modes again, since she did it in the previous sentence. I thought this was a good way of handling and explaining this – Bravo!

So, the rest of the time we just talked about the semester and how the meetings have benefited her tutoring, etc. Kathryn feels as though mentor meetings have helped her become more at ease with social interaction, since she is a very shy person. She also feels more confident since she was able to ask questions, advice, etc. Overall, we both enjoyed being able to express concerns to each other about our students.
I’m glad I was able to mentor Kathryn this semester. I wish I could have observed her at least once, but with our schedules we were unable to.

-KC

Kendra&Keenan

Keenan and I are both surprised that it has been quite slow at the WC, especially since it’s the end of the semester – so it’s been pretty relaxed. Remember that drop-in student he had who wasn’t prepared for her session and just didn’t want to be there? Well, she has become a weekly! Keenan said that she came in on Monday, not prepared and he warned her that if she didn’t bring anything to work on next week, he was going to have her free write for an hour and/or work on grammar sheets! Bravo! I was really pleased with the way he handled this. I think confirming with the student what to bring next session is a really great idea and useful tool. I usually confirm with my students at the end of the session what they plan on bringing in the following week. We also talked about his one weekly that I observed last week, Ryan; I asked Keenan how his paper turned out. He said that Ryan only wrote about Karma and didn’t include the fact and faith part. I asked him what his advice/tips were to help Ryan tie in the connection of F&F. He said that a student, who also is a weekly and working on the same paper, was told by a peer to write the definition of faith at the beginning of the introduction, sort of as a “what’s to come.” So, he suggested this to Ryan. I thought that this was a great tip to pass along, especially since everyone has a different definition of Faith. So even though he mostly wrote about Karma, Keenan and Ryan collaborated on ways to bring it back to Fact & Faith (Karma that is).

For the rest of our meeting, we talked about student horror stories and how I handled them. Of course, I had to tell him about the student who wrote a very inappropriate paper. Keenan has yet to have a student horror story…any other mentors have some good scenarios that I can tell my mentees (to see how they would have handled them)?

-KC

Gannon Ments

Jo and I had a pretty neat session last week. I got to observe Jo tutor a student. It was somewhat of a unique session which Jo handled admirably.

The studnet was a music major like Jo, and brought in a rather difficult, confusing paper. Although I wasn't sure exactly what the paper was about, Jo had taken this class and was very familiar with the coursework. From what I understood, the student had to analyze a song, but she was more focused on writing a paper about the composer. This was not the assignment, and I could tell this was bothering Jo.

After reading the paper, Jo struggled for a moment asking a lot of skirting questions about the paper. Eventually, she got to the problem, at first using a minimalist approach. She started by asking questions on how the student was planing to write the paper without getting too broad or straying too far from what she was supposed to write about. The student still was sticking to her idea, but was starting to realize that what she had before her was going to make her paper more difficult than it needed to be.

Jo started addressing the subject more directly, voicing her concern that writing about the composer would draw attention away from the purpose of the paper, to focus on the song. The paper could have some information about the composer, Jo noted, but too much could make the paper too long. Around this moment, the student realized that Jo's argument had lot of merit, and changed her thesis so that it was more in-line with the statement.

The student was really great in the session. It's a difficult thing to realize that one's approach to a paper is wrong, as is the thought of having to start over, but the student listened to Jo carefully and was very engaged. At the end of the session, she asked me what I was taking notes on and I told her I was here to give feedback to Jo's performance. She laughed and said, "She's good, but she's a hard one."

Looking back at my notes, I was concerned that Jo was being too hard, but looking back now, I don't think she was. Jo saw a problem that needed fixing fast, so she did what she could to get the paper more focused. This required her to be hard - if she went at the session too softly, the student might not have realized how important this change was.

Week 12 and 13 Combo: Colin and Coco

Hey all,

I missed my blogging last week so I'll catch you up on this week and last week's sessions with Colin.

Last week we spent a lot of time talking about payroll and fixing a discrepancy we'd both had with the most recent three-week pay period. So that ate up a lot of time, but luckily we got it all sorted out. We didn't have a lot of specific sessions to talk about, but I noticed that I had a drop-in student Colin has had before who was ESL so he shared some things he found helpful when working with her. It's really nice how the mentor-mentee thing can be a two-way street, because I've found my talks with Colin to be really helpful to my own performance as a tutor.

This week we jumped in right off the bat talking about the students we've had for the past week. Colin had a drop-in who had picked a really difficult topic to research for a Marketing paper, and he talked about the troubles they'd had trying to find sources. Her teacher was a really difficult grader and she'd almost failed the last few papers. When she left, his student was very happy and even made a comment about what a big help he'd been. It seems that he restored her confidence a little bit, and made her more motivated to try harder on this paper. We spent a little while dissecting the session and discussing what had been so successful about it.

I had a session last week I brought up as well that I feel was really important. A drop-in came to me with a paper I just saw as "needing a little tweaking". She, however, saw it as a total disaster paper that needed to be completely re-written. After talking through the organization and formatting briefly, we discussed the content of her paper and I commended her for a lot of the ways she'd interpreted her sources and drawn conclusions. She had been focusing so hard on the faults in her paper that she hadn't stopped to notice what she'd done well. I feel like the compliments I'd given her made her realize that her paper wasn't as bad as she'd initially thought, and she thanked me profusely. Colin and I discussed this and talked about how sometimes restoring somebody's confidence in their writing can be just as helpful, if not more, than fixing grammar or working on the actual writing itself.

I guess that sort of goes hand-in-hand with the goal of helping our students become better writers.

The Adventures of Alex and Stephen week 12

Hey guys!

So on Tuesday I finally got to observe Mr. Villatoro in action. I was pretty pleased. He was very conversational with this student. He had the student alternate reading out loud with him. So each of them would read a paragraph at a time. I asked stephen why he did it that way and he said that sometimes for longer papers he feels the student will stop paying attention if he reads it out loud or he himself may zone out. Alternating readers seemed to really work for this student. He then used the student's paper as a launching point to create ideas of how the student can research. He used word to create an outline. During our discussion afterwards I told him he should try using inpspiration 8 next time because it allows for a little bit more student tutor interaction. He told me he isn't very familiar with inspiration 8 so in a future session I'm going to actually go through a mock tutorial with him using inspiration 8. Another admirable thing about Stephen's session was the fact that he did not let his opinions sway the session. The student was writing a paper about catholicism and had some pretty outlandish claims. Stephen kept telling the student to back it up with research instead of telling him he was flat out wrong.

Today during our mentor hour Stephen, Kendra and I talked about the difficult student that Kendra mentioned in her pervious post. He said he would have done the same thing and not let the student stay more than an hour. He is hoping he gets a difficult student before the semester is over so that he can learn how to adapt his style of tutoring to less than ideal situations.

Kendra and Kathryn

Hey all,

Kathryn and I had another mentor meeting today. She was a little concerned because she has had a weekly student that hasn’t come into the LS all semester – but don’t we all have that one student! I suggested that next time, she go to the front desk and tell them she can take a drop-in student, but mention that she has had a weekly student that hasn’t come in. We talked about the whole “pen in hand” issue again. She had an ESL student that wanted her to check her grammar and make sure that the sentence flowed. The student wanted Kathryn to read her paper aloud (the student was worried about her English). They went through it once, and then they went back over it. I explained to her that this is a great technique because it doesn’t make the student as nervous – we talked about this last week. We both sort of do the same thing, go through the paper once, making notes and then going back to revise it with the student.

We also talked about uncomfortable sessions. I shared my story to Kathryn about the student that we had last summer. He would come in and go from female tutor to tutor without letting the front desk know. Well, he wrote a very graphic and inappropriate paper on Gladiator. Needless to say, these “scenes” were not in the movie, but were graphic enough to make me extremely uncomfortable. When the session was over, two hours later, all the other female tutors said that he was inappropriate to them and was very aggressive. Well, he is here sometimes, so I asked Kathryn what she would have done in that situation. How would she handle a two hour session with a student who seemed like he had a LD? Kathryn said that she wouldn’t have let the student stay for two hours in the first place. I always advise by this, but I did think that he had a LD because he wasn’t focused but was really motivated to write and seemed like he appreciated the time that I was giving him. Kathryn did laugh because if he was part of the Fiction Department, he would have just fit in just fine. I guess they like when people are graphic…it expresses their personality through their writing, and they don’t want censorship. But anyway, she says it’s hard to say because it’s one of those “In the moment situations,” which it was. I told Kathryn that if this ever happens again, excuse yourself saying you’re going to the bathroom, or message the front desk on MSN. Too bad we didn’t have that in the summer. But hey, lesson learned.
So there hasn’t been much going on, it’s been pretty slow. I hope you all have a good weekend!

-KC

Kendra - Keenan

Hey all,

For today’s mentor meeting, I observed Keenan during one of his sessions with his weekly student, Ryan DeLuca (this was my first time observing him)!! Ryan and Keenan started off the sessions by asking how his week was going. Keenan then subtly brought their conversation back to writing, and asked him what he had to work on. He came in to the session with a new prompt for his final paper: Fact & Faith. So, this session was just brainstorming. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Keenan and Ryan interact with each other. He sat across from Ryan and kept great eye contact -they were both really engaged in the session. Keenan started off the brainstorming by asking Ryan if he was religious; getting him to expand on his thoughts that could be narrowed down to a more focused topic. Ryan decided to go towards the religious aspect, and settled on the word Karma. Since he chose a topic, Keenan asked if he wanted to free-write for about 10-15 minutes. During that time, Keenan searched for an article that had to do with fact and faith. I thought that this was a great move on Keenan’s part - he thought that this could help Ryan inspired - which it did! (I actually plan on doing this in my future sessions-if it helps of course). When Ryan was done writing, Keenan asked him if he felt comfortable reading it, or if he wanted him to read it aloud. When he was done, Keenan and Ryan went back and forth on how to format it. For example, he could do the intro, then have concrete evidence about Karma, then maybe end with the narrative about giving a bum a cigarette or money (which Ryan wrote about). Keenan asked questions that could benefit to the paper and suggested that he find a middle ground between Karma - the good vs. evil. After this conversation, Ryan said, “The middle ground will really help me out; can I start to write now?” So he did, while Keenan and I discussed the session. He thought that it went really well, and so do I. I don’t have any concerns with Keenan’s tutoring. His students really seem to have a connection with him and are comfortable. I told him that this was key to a successful session - or at least important.

Sorry if this is really unorganized! If you have any questions...I do have a my written notes!!

He did express one concern to me that didn’t have to do with the session. On Monday, he was given a student half past the hour. Everyone else left, and he was the only tutor. I guess the front desk person said that he only needed a half hour, or that he only needed a few minutes. I guess this upsets me, because he had a student that hour; but left early. I mean, I asked Keenan if he got anything done or if he had to stay late and he said that it was difficult because he had to fill out this long grammar sheet. Can we take students half past the hour? I always thought that we weren’t suppose to because it’s not enough time.

Have a good rest of the week,
-KC

Gannon Blogs

Hey all,

I haven't talked about my time with Jo in quite some time! Let's talk about Jo.
Last Thursday, Jo and I discussed a session she felt had not been successful. Apparently he'd come in with a close-to final draft of his paper, and they ended up spending most of the session talking about his ideas rather than his paper. She felt as though she had given her student too much guidance - she worried that her advice might have put too much of what she wanted in the paper. She also felt as though perhaps they should have spent less time on the ideas and more time on the paper itself.
I told Jo that I didn't think that the session sounded so bad. In fact, I thought it sounded like a pretty successful session. Even though she felt uneasy, it sounds like she stuck to her guns and asked though-provoking questions with the occasional bit of advice thrown in. I imagine the session helped the student improve the content of his paper, and thus would do more good than if the tutor spent more time working on paper-based concerns.

The Adventures of Alex and Stephen

Hey guys!!!

Stephen and I started our meeting off with discussing the mentor meeting last week. We talked about the minimalist versus directive approach and whether or not a tutor should use a pen. We both agreed that one must use a mix of both approaches in order to be successful. Stephen said he always makes copies of his students papers. That way he can write on his own copy and the student does not feel as "invaded".

He only has one weekly student now. This week's session was a bit difficult. His student wrote a paper on why cars should be considered art. He had his student just discuss why he felt that way. He encouraged his student to back his claim up by adding more personal details about why he feels cars are art.

He also had a student from the legal aspects class. I've had two students from the same class this week. We discussed the difficulties with these students because they do not listen to their teacher's advice as far as looking at the turabian book on their own. I told Stephen that it isn't our job to teach them this style of citation. They need to put the effort into it first. This actually seems to a problem with this class in general. So we are wondering how we handle this when we aren't familiar with this style of citation and students expect us to teach it to them.

Kendra

Kathryn and I started off by discussing last week’s mentor meeting. We collaborated on how the meeting went and conversed about the subtopics that came up. We then talked about Kathryn’s sessions this week and how they went. She has also encountered the Writing & Rhetoric II group (working on their creativity papers). This week, Kathryn had a student that wanted to do a “silent” brainstorming. For example, she would ask a question for them to talk about, however, he would just write down what she asked (he was planning on answering when he got home). She figured that this was his learning style – although she was concerned that he was going to get home and not have the right length (4 pages) or not know the answers to the questions. I assured Kathryn that these were good concerns; however, she could have collaborated with him on each question or asked him to give a brief answer and write down ideas to expand on later. Kathryn did say that she tried to get him to talk, but he just kept saying “No, I think I got enough material to go on.” I think Kathryn handled this well – every student has a different learning style and this was his. She did very well!

I observed Kathryn a few times last semester, so I know her tutoring style – I do plan on doing an end of the semester observation, just to see how she has improved.

-KC

Kendra

Hey All,

Since Keenan was not at the mentor meeting on Friday, I filled him on what we talked about. I focused on the discussion about using a pen/pencil during the session. I wanted to get his input on this point and if he always directs to this. He said that at the beginning, when he first tutored, that he never used a pencil (they were taught in class not to use one), but would get lost while the student read the paper. Now, he usually puts a mark or a star where he needs to go back and collaborate with the student. I encouraged him to use a pencil, not necessarily to critique their work, but to just stay focused and make side notes. I explained to him that I use to not use a pencil either, but I always felt lost or felt as though I would ask the same questions twice. I also touched base on grammar during a session. Keenan said that he usually just sticks to the content, however, will go through grammar if the student/teacher asks.

During the second part of our meeting, we talked about his sessions that he had this week. Keenan explained to me that he had his first “difficult” session. The student came in for the first time (for all of you who do not know, Writing & Rhetoric II students are coming in needing to fit six sessions in before the end of the semester). His student came in with just a free write that took up just half a page. With that, he tried to collaborate with her and brainstorm. Keenan said that she wouldn’t talk back and said, “I don’t talk about my writing.” Well then. He let her leave a ½ hour early because she didn’t want to be there. In some way I agree, I mean we are here for them and if they don’t want to be here then that’s their choice. However, he could have taken two different routes. He could have let her leave, or he could have had her work on Inspiration 8 – with the outline or the web. He also didn’t let the teacher know that she left early, so I advised him to just tell the teacher next time that she was here only for half the time and that it’s up to her whether or not she gets credit. I told him an experience that I had -the student said she didn’t want to stay the whole time so, I told her that she wouldn’t get credit, and badabing!…she opened up and we had the intro and conclusion done by the end of the 50 minute session. Anyone else have advice?
I do plan on observing him during his session next Wednesday (weekly student).

-KC

Inspiration 8 and Patience(not the Guns and Roses Song): By Alex Rosales

Hey all. Today was a rather good mentoring session with Tim. The first part of it was a tutorial for Inspiration 8 (at his request). He was telling me that he had a session earlier today that was a brainstorming one. Inspiration 8 was something that he had wanted to use, to get the student to really think about the assignment, but didn't feel comfortable enough to do so. He still had a "good" session. He talked about the main idea of the paper with his student for about 15 minutes before having a nice discussion about the prompt questions. Getting the student into the right frame of mind for a paper is something that we as tutors should always try to do, and that was one of the lessons that Tim went away with today.
The next lesson that we talked about was patience. I had regaled him with a session that I had right before our mentor meeting. My student is always a little bit reluctant to throw out his own ideas. When I encounter this problem with him, I always try to ask him thought-provoking questions. I won't continue with the session until he gives me a response. This means that there are awkward gaps where the session is just silent. That awkwardness is kind of an incentive for the student to respond and continue to have a conversation throughout the session. I know that we as tutors sometimes want to just tell the student to do something in a particular way when they don't want to cooperate, but it takes restraint to fight this urge. It also takes patience to get the student to do work in the session, sometimes. I believe that this is an important message to relay to our mentees because they need to learn early on how to make a difficult (define that how you will) student do work. This is also a lesson that one of the tutor training courses taught.

Gannon

Hello, hello!

Last week you may recall me saying I would reflect on Mike's tutoring of me and share my findings with y'all this week. Well, it was a wee bit inconclusive, so I ended being tutored by him again this week. I came to him with three short essays, all about comedy. Although this is a subject Mike isn't so familiar with, he was able to ask a lot of excellent questions and would offer direct advice when I asked for it. He did a great job working with what he was given and going great spans of distances. For example, I had to write about what comedians or shows made me laugh, and I was encouraged to be specific- thus as I had to describe to him very specific comedy bits he wasn't familiar with. Still, he was still able to talk to me about it and help me word my wordless thoughts into hard ideas. By the end of the session, I had a strong outline for these three essays a head of me. This session shows me that Mike can handle sessions involving subjects he knows nothing about pretty admirably.

Coco and Colin

Hey all,

Colin and I started off our session today by discussing last week's mentor meeting a bit. He found it helpful and interesting to get so much input from everyone else on things we've been discussing for the past few weeks. Today we talked a little about Colin's sessions with his weekly student, which are going well.

He asked about how my sessions have been and it segued into a sort of discussion about what methods we think work best for what students, as well as our strengths and weaknesses as both writers and tutors. We shared some little hints that we often give our students and things we do to tailor our tutoring style depending on the student. The example I gave was a weekly of mine who has a lot of trouble with organization and staying on topic. We discussed things I already do in our sessions to help him teach himself organization in his writing (like making a backwards outline, which is something I do with a lot of drop-ins as well that really seems to be helpful), and Colin gave me some suggestions as well. We also discussed the sort of "stigma" associated with seeing a tutor, and why so many students seem reluctant to ask for help with their writing.

After a while, our conversation started to run out of steam so we just chatted for a bit until his weekly student showed up.

Kendra

Hey all,

Kathryn and I had another mentoring meeting today. We started off the session talking about an article that I was given: “What’s really in Red Bull.” After about 10 minutes of laughing and being grossed out, we began talking about her one student that she had this week. The student was a Drop-In, wanting to brainstorm for her creativity paper for Writing & Rhetoric I. Kathryn said that she had a hard time getting the student to collaborate and open up. For example, she would just write down what Kathryn said without talking about it. Kathryn handled this by trying to get the student thinking and asking questions such as, “What about this makes you creative?” or “How does this inspire you?” I was really happy to hear how she handled this. I encouraged her to ask questions to get the student thinking, because talking about the topic, especially in brainstorm sessions, can help the student jog a memory, etc. Kathryn and I collaborated, agreeing that if this student was a weekly, she would have been more open and Kathryn would have been able to know what questions to ask, and what ways to go about asking them (as well as her writing style, learning, etc.). That was her only student this week, and I am very pleased with her tutoring.

See ya’ll today!
KC

KC

Hey all,

Today Keenan and I talked about his sessions that he had this past week. We started off by talking about his two weekly students. He said that Monday was rough; they were both tired and slogging through the session, however, she told Keenan that she was pretty confident in her W&R class, and he agreed. I encouraged him on the fact that he didn’t just let the student go because she didn’t have anything to work on, but suggested she stay and work on other material. His other weekly student wrote his 2nd draft for his class, but didn’t have it or anything concrete to work on. Instead, Keenan had him write out a moment in his 2nd draft that wasn’t as strong as the others. They collaborated on this and had him write it up. Once again, I praised him for working with his students and using the session wisely. He had one drop-in student this week who worked on a W&R paper that Keenan had written before – so he said that went well. Overall, he said that this has been a pretty easy semester for tutoring. Since he will not be at the meeting on Friday, I asked him if he had any ideas to contribute about session dynamics – he did not.

That’s it for now, see you all on Friday!
KC

Alex R.'s mentor session for this week

Today Tim and I had a session about patience. We started off the session as we normally do, talking about the sessions that we have had since our last meeting. This week we both had ESL sessions and I had a student with disabilities session. ESL students were the topic of our first discussion.
Tim's student was more of a regular session than an ESL session because his student had a rather good grasp of the English language. Mine, however, took a little bit of patience to get through. Both of our students had come in for help with grammar. Now, this was where our conversation got rather interesting. We talked about how good ESL students are at getting their ideas on a page. His student had a better grasp of English, as I stated before, so he was able to get through their papers (she had two) rather quickly. My student took a little longer, though. He had a seven page paper with lots of grammatical errors. Most of the time, by reading his paper out loud, he was able to hear the mistakes that he had made. The rest of the time, though, took a little longer because I had to explain why some of the mistakes were wrong. On occasion, I had to explain things a few times before my student really understood what was being said to him. This was an important lesson, I thought, to impart on Tim. It takes patience to work with ESL students because of the language barrier. However, with perseverance, the session runs a lot smoother.
The next topic was about students with disabilities. I had my first session with one of these students last Friday. It was interesting because I found that it was a lot easier to work with this kind of student than I had thought. He was very aware of what was going on and grasped the concepts and ideas that I had thrown out quite easily. There were a few times where I had to repeat myself, but overall it was a rather smooth session. Yet another lesson, don't judge a book by its cover (I know it's cliche, but it's true). We talked about how preconceived notions about people and sessions should be disregarded. All sessions are to be taken and handled on a case-by-case basis. Different types of students are very useful to us as tutors because we learn different methods of tutoring when in sessions with them. That was the main lesson of this week's mentor session.

Gannon

Hello all,

Today I had a different sort of mentoring session with Mike. I tried instead of mulling over his week of tutoring actually having him tutoring me - thus, I am able to see firsthand how his tutoring style works and at the same time I'll be able to improve my own writing. Overall, Mike did a pretty good job asking thought provoking questions while at the same time offering plainspoken advice. However, at times it felt like he was giving too much information, so that I'd still be thinking over something he'd said, just as he moved onto another point. I'm going to think this session over a little more and then I'll present my findings to him next week.

Coco and Colin

Greetings, greetings fellow mentors!

Colin and I had a pretty quick meeting today. He's gotten to the point where he feels comfortable and confident as a tutor, with no real problems to bring up. He's still getting the occasional drop-in, and saw today in Time Trade that he has a new weekly student. He's adjusted well, so we spent a while discussing various experiences with sessions we've had in the past week. There was no real discussion on any specific issue or topic, other than the fact that he's doing well and enjoying the momentary lull that comes about before the inevitable explosion of finals week students.

Alex and Stephen

Heyrow everyone!

It was a slow week for Stephen. None of his weeklys showed up and he didn't get a drop in! He did tell me that one of his weeklys added him on facebook. I asked him how he handled it and he said that he accepted the request because he is afterall a student too. I thought that was interesting. I'm not friends with any of my students on facebook unless they are dance majors so I don't really know how I would handle the sitatuion. Stephen went on to talk about how he thinks that a major component of being a tutor is the ability to be social in order to draw the students in. I asked him to clarify what he meant by being "social". He said he didn't think that a tutor should be neccesarily outgoing. However, he thinks that tutors should have a way of engaging the students. He also went on to say that he sometimes tries to make the students feel like they aren't in the "learning studio". He tries to make it as casual as possible, and most like a conversation.

Food for thought?

Kendra (Kathryn)

Before our session even started, Nita came over to gather tutors that hadn’t gone to the Grammar Workshop. I attended on Tuesday, however Kathryn didn’t, so during our scheduled time to meet she participated in the Grammar Workshop. After it was done, we were able to talk a bit about her tutoring as well as any concerns that she has. Kathryn said that she had been getting many ESL students. Two weeks ago (when I wasn’t here), she tutored Chikara, the Japanese tutor. He had a lot of trouble with placing articles in front of a noun. For example, he wrote “He ate sandwich,” instead of “He at a sandwich.” She had trouble with balancing grammar and content, meaning she didn’t want to be a grammar teacher, but also didn’t want to abandon the grammatical errors in his paper. I explained to her that students come in to work on different things; however, asking them why they specifically came to the WC in the beginning of the session will only benefit the session. I do know that Kathryn does ask this in the beginning of the session, so I encouraged her to keep doing this technique. Overall, things have been going great with Kathryn and her tutoring. She does get nervous working with ESL students, but I explained that the first couple of sessions are nerve-racking but they get easier the more you do them.

Have a good weekend all!
Kendra Callari