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
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Kendra-nice post--as tutors we always need to be prepared for the unusual--a fact we should share with our mentees. So here we have yet another apathetic student who has little interest in her writing and sees "no need" to come to the WC. Yet she returns to work w/Keenan--yeah! we need more situations like these for sure! Of course Keenan had to convince her of the value of coming to the WC by using "the grammar threat." This brings up an interesting parallel to directive tutoring methods. Keenan asserted himself before the next session almost forcing this student to bring in what she needed to work on. Bravo Keenan! Sometimes, dear fellow mentors, we need to assert ourselves to get anywhere with students (see my reponse to Gannon's post). I realize that this may be difficult for some especially the more coy among us but ultimately it does benefit the student.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Keenan succeeded in helping his student Ryan come back to this topic of "faith" in his writing. Although this may seem just repeating what occured last week, we must all keep in mind that much of what we do is recursive--we go back to what was already discussed and revisit some of our ideas. So it's fine to return to previous material and reconsider some points that were perhaps neglected.
Re: Horror Stories--it's always helpful to give students warning about sessions that don't go right for a myriad of reasons. As I have mentioned numerous times we often learn more from sessions that don't go smoothly. Everyone should clearly articulate this point with their mentees. Well done
Steve
I appreciated reading about how Keenan held the authority in his session with the unprepared weekly writer. I think sometimes tutors are uneasy with the idea of asserting themselves in sessions, either because of the peer dynamic or they fear that it will taint future sessions with a negative vibe. But pushing writers is an important part of our job. It's pure laziness to not question and work with our writers throughout the duration of a session. If a writer says their paper is "fine" and that it doesn't need to be reviewed, it is your job as a tutor to convince them to review it anyway. As we all know, a piece of writing is never "finished" and passing that mentality on to writers is important. This builds work ethic an initiative.
ReplyDeleteI suppose another level to this question is the role of the tutor as a peer. While we are approachable, I don't believe that we are their friends first, which I wrote about earlier in a response to the ongoing Facebook question. If we are concerned about being "liked" by our students, we do not have our priorities straight about hour job. As Keenan displayed, it is possible to be assertive and direct while being friendly at the same time. I think this displays a healthy level of work ethic on his part that needs to be copied.
Nice post.