Comfortable with tutoring

I'm not sure exactly what made this tutoring experience so much different than all the others, but the two sessions I had last week were awesome. I think the reason things went so smoothly can be partially attributed to the level of comfort I've felt recently in the writing center. Instead of going in and getting asked, "hi, do you have an appointment?", I've been greeted with smiles, friendly greetings, and people who now remember my name.

As I walked into the writing center last Thursday, the girl I was tutoring first had gotten there early and was already waiting for me when I arrived. I usually don't like to be rushed in any situation, so I was surprised with how calm and comfortable I felt jumping right in without getting much of a chance to situate myself. The tutee seemed to be a little all over the place in terms of her writing assignment. She told me that you could pick any movie from the class you wanted and write about it and that was all I had to work with in regards to the prompt. I wasn't familiar with the movie she had seen and well, neither was she. I eventually started reading her essay aloud, though, and as we got to about page 3 (of a 7 page paper), it was apparent that my tutee's attention span was waning. I'm not sure she was listening at all to what I was reading and I think I even saw her texting. Rather than get mad, or tell her to pay attention, I found it pertinent to change my strategy. I recognized her writing style to be similar to mine, circa ENC1101: a decent writer, not too bad with grammar, but a little hasty and unorganized. I can remember writing freshmen papers that amounted to one really long strain of conciseness. The problem was usually rooted in the fact that I didn't have a thesis, and thus, didn't know how to structure my paper.

So okay, rather than pursue with the mundane task of reading through her paper right off the bat, I had her talk to me a little bit more about the direction she wanted this paper to go in. I had noticed a few reoccurring topics, and so that's where we started. We pulled out what she felt were the most important topics or themes of the movie she had chosen to write about and then discussed what made them important in the movie. Before I knew it, we had together composed a short list that would amount to a pretty decent thesis and, subsequently, a good paper if executed properly. I had her put all the ideas together and take a minute to put together a thesis statement. After we had a good idea of how to structure the paper off of the thesis she had composed, we then went through and re-read it. We figured out how to reorganize the paragraphs to make them flow in conjunction with her thesis. This paper that I initially thought was a complete mess of thoughts was really coming together!

This session was really cool. We laughed a few times, I shared a personal story about a similar writing experience, and the tutee left feeling like they had a good grip on their paper. I also feel like I gave her some important tips that she will be able to use in future papers, regarding theses and basic structure.