So last week I was undercover, I went in a session as a tutee rather than an observer. That day the tutor that was helping me on my research paper was being observed by one of his peers, so my tutor was being observed by two different people at the same time.
I want to start off by saying he has the knowledge and I think he helped the second tutee and I with our paper, but he lacked on time management. He spent so much time on the second tutee I began counting the boxes on the ceiling. I don't know if he was nervous because his peer was observing him but you can feel his nervousness through his actions. He would look at the clock continuously, shake his leg, tap his fingers it was obvious he was nervous.
While he was helping the tutee with her paper, I couldn't help but notice how quickly he let her go. He said everything was fine and everything made sense. He then began pointing out some of her grammatical errors that she had in her paper. I know that's a no-no from this class, but if you are getting observed by a senior tutor from the writing center, shouldn't that be the number one thing to avoid during that session?
He began reading my Moffett paper, he said everything was correct and what ever my professor wrote is what I am missing. I replied saying "Yeah, I know that...how can I include my thoughts in this paper without sounding repetitive or without making this paper sound like an autobiography?" I think that intimidated him because he was like "I'm sorry if that was not what you wanted to hear..." It really wasn't what I wanted to hear because I can clearly read that through the comments on my paper. Anyways, so I took control sort of and I said "I guess I'll write a paragraph that is my thoughts and stick it in the first paragraph and you can check if it makes sense or if I'm getting off topic?" and so he went on to the second tutor and helped her with more grammatical errors, then she left. So here I am writing and my tutor is drinking soda and playing with his pen because he let his second tutee leave so early.
I write my paragraph and then he said "this is perfect it has some of your thoughts and your connect it back to Moffett's theory which makes sense, how about you write another paragraph for individualism?" At that point I knew he was using me to fulfill the hour session and for his observer to keep note of that.
I wrote the paragraph and he just complimented the paragraph saying that it makes sense then he gave me some ideas to go home with saying that my thoughts can be based on education in general and/or my own personal experience in an urban public school. That sort of helped me at the end because when I was revising my paper I was able to explain how my education in an urban public school would have been different if I was taught the three I's.
I didn't like that he was just restating what my teacher had already wrote on the paper, I feel like rather than just restating that and giving me the ideas ahead of time I could have wrote a paragraph comparing my own public school experience and Moffett's three I's theory, but he waited till the end to tell me that so I had to work on that on my own.
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