Tutoring Experiences So Far

My first experience tutoring was when I co-tutored, and I was overwhelmed with mixed emotions. The tutor that I co-tutored with had set me up with a person that he thought would be a good starter appointment. When the girl came in the other tutor explained that I was a first time tutor, so that put the pressure off, and then pretty much let me do the appointment on my own. We went through introductions and I asked what her paper was on to get the appointment started. She began to tell me that she was finished with the paper and it was due tomorrow and the only thing that she had changed since her last appointment was the title. Siren bells went off in my head, oh god please let me be able to help her in some way! I shake my fears off and put the knowledge I have learned thus far into my head. She explains that the paper is really a set of poems from personal journals they wrote in class. From the minute I looked at her paper, I could tell it was filled with a lot of very personal information, including deaths and accidents in her family, so I felt uncomfortable asking her to read it aloud. I made a judgment call and decided not to read it aloud, but keep her engaged in the appointment. From the get go I was completely amazed with her writing! I understood that she had had previous appointments and was pretty much done with it, but besides one minor mistake I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So I just gave positive feedback about her writing and how she captured the imagery her teacher seemed to want. She had changed her title and I told her that it connected with her theme better, of never giving up and perseverance. She ended her last poem on a sad note so I suggested that she may want to think about putting the positive theme more at the very end. Then at the end of the appointment, which she booked for an hour, we sat and talked and she thanked me and then left. I was a bit disappointed, wondering if this was the way it was going to be every time! I felt like I was no help to her at all, but I knew that I had done the best I could and I suppose that every appointment is different and that I can’t be a fair judge until I have more experience.

Well today I had a completely different experience. A girl came in and was a walk-in so I offered to help her. She seemed frazzled and overwhelmed from the beginning, so I tried to remain calm. She pulled her paper up and I asked her what her topic was, which she then pulled up on her laptop. After reading through the topic I asked her if she could read her paper aloud and if there were any mistakes we could figure them out together. She immediately seemed to get annoyed and said the paper was really long, so I told her I would read it aloud and told her to stop me if she heard anything out of place. I find out her paper has to deal a lot with sexuality in Ancient Greece. I could barely pronounce any of the words and felt like a moron! But I continued on understanding the benefit of this. She asked me a lot of questions about in text citations, the only problem was that they were ancient books and a bit more confusing than normal. I pulled up Purdue Owl and used that as a source to help her and also told her that I am not too familiar with MLA having just started using it again, so she may want to double check with someone else. I realized she was having trouble developing her thesis, didn’t have one of the source requirements, and no conclusion. So I decided to tackle the thesis and introductory paragraph. Well this girl had thought that I should write her thesis for her, so I had to keep redirecting her to make her write it herself. This session lasted an hour and a half and it was exhausting, but I felt like I had helped her a lot and if she had come sooner, she would have benefited more.

For now I am going to remain positive and collect as many tutoring experiences as I can, as well as brushing up on my MLA formatting.