I had a tutoring
session the other day and he was prepared for the session! He had a paper on a
burger king advertisement for his ENC1101 class, so I felt confident having
already taking this class. He had already turned in three drafts and was going
to turn in his final draft that week. We discussed his teachers comment then
read his paper aloud, making corrections as we went. There were some
suggestions I had made for him to change and he told me that his teacher didn't
comment on that so he didn't want to change it. This is a moment where I felt
conflicted and didn't know what to do, so I moved on to help him expand his
paper knowing that he needed to add at least two more pages. In my mind I
wanted to press for him to change these grammatical mistakes, but at the same
time I know that the writing centers focus is not on direct tutoring (although
that may be changing), any suggestions on what I should have done?
Another thing that
I have noticed, in multiple sessions, is that a lot of tutees don't understand
how to create citations. I'm not an expert but I have used Purdue Owl to help
in these sessions. Maybe the writing center could carry guides to MLA and APA
formatting?
In the session I
helped him come up with ideas to expand his papers. Who is the audience of the
paper, who is the audience of the advertisement? He left with enough ideas to
finish his paper and thanked me for my help. In this session I actually felt as
though I helped. I felt more prepared for the session, having already taken the
class and this has been my best tutoring experience so far.
I really like your idea of having MLA handouts at the ready! It's not a burden per se, but it is a bit of a damper to have to pause what you're doing, go on the computer and pull up the site to show them and have them write down the address for later (or bookmark it). I also have noticed though a lot of students (especially freshman) are not sure how to do citations, so I have been in a similar boat. A couple of the kids I showed the site too seemed especially happy about it since they had never even seen/heard of it!
ReplyDeleteAs for the grammatical errors you encountered, I have been in the boat as well. I've had the student read the sentence or mistake out loud and ask them if they notice anything is wrong with the sentence. Most of the time they have caught it and changed it themselves. I think if it's a pretty major error (you might have to be the judge) and impedes the flow of the paper or is something they perhaps repeat through the whole paper (such as verb tenses, etc) then I think it would be doing them a favor to very kindly point it out, that way they can be aware and hopefully learn from and try to fix it. You don't need to go through if it's a tense issue for an example and help them correct each one, but maybe point out one or two and let them know why they are wrong and you saw some others so they should go back and look at it if it makes any sense.
I had someone else from that same class! She was writing about Covergirl commercials and how they affect young girls' perception of beauty. She was also really prepared for the session and very dynamic about her paper. This was definitely one of my best tutoring sessions for the semester. She did not know much about MLA and wanted help with that but I just referred her to Purdue OWL, it's what I use because MLA/APA/Turabian always have really minute changes and aren't worth memorizing if there are already webpages that have them laid out in great detail.
ReplyDeleteI remember being in ENC1101 and not knowing anything about citation, in fact thinking it was stupid, but it had all explained to me before and I just didn't care. I'm sure all freshmen get a lecture about it from a library staffer in one of their classes and just don't care. It's one of those things that you skim through and get the main idea and remember where to find the big picture when you really need it.