Today, during my first tutoring session my tutees were pretty cool. I had to help two students who were doing two different arguments about biculturalism. I asked them to define it and they looked at me as if I had five heads. One girl, DeeDee, kept talking about how she was going to write her paper, so I assumed she was going to do an outline, well I was wrong. She was writing like irrelevant stuff like "don't forget to show evidence...check grammar" and she really thought she had something going. So I was like "Hey that's pretty good, but lets try finding evidence from the text since you don't have research now."That's when I knew she did not read the text.
Moving on to the second tutee, CeeCee, she was really good she knew the story like the back of her hand, she was able to tell me what she wanted to write about and she was telling me how she was going to prove it, the only thing that she wasn't doing was writing it down. So I was like "Hey that's an awesome idea, you should write that down before you forget it and then you're going to be like oh no what did I tell Jamie!" so she wrote it down.
Then I moved on to DeeDee, she was still writing nonsense, she was just telling me "you really helped me out" and I was like "I tried, so what do you have so far?" and she was like beating around the bush not saying anything. I told her that maybe she should write her first paragraph on how the Chinese girl helps her mom translate and how that is strength because she is bilingual, and she wrote that down so then I was like okay so start from there what can you research that will help prove that biculturalism is a strength rather than a confusion. She began to write, finally.
CeeCee had her 3 body paragraphs and her conclusion set up she just needed her intro and her thesis. It was time for us to leave so I tried listening to her thoughts and at the end she told me her thesis, I don't know if she wrote it down though, I really hope she did. She told me she was going to define biculturalism in her own words by explaining how it is a confusion for college students, and her definition would be her thesis. I thought that was a interesting way for her to start her paper, hopefully the professor is cool with that.
DeeDee finished her outline and then I asked her about her intro and thesis and she said, "I'm going to define biculturalism but as a strength," she copied CeeCee's idea, but I guess they worked off of each other.
It was pretty fun though, we didn't have any downtime. They were talking, reading and writing the whole time, pretty proud of myself.
Its interesting to see the differences in personality and how they take to advice. I like how you were able to have good time management between the two tutees and address them individually and their needs. The only thing I have to say is that it seems that one student was more productive than the other and that student was able to gain an outline without doing the work. Despite this I do say that this may be more of a help because maybe this will spark more ideas for this student to write about. Overall it seems like you had a good experience today and did a great job at helping your tutees find their direction for their papers.
ReplyDeleteI feel that you handled the tutoring session really well, by having two students at a different level of writing their pieces. On the situation of the girl not having read the text I think you handled the situation in a sufficient way, because to tell you the truth I think I would have been stuck on what to help DeeDee with since she did not have all the material down yet. it seems to me that you had a good experience with tutoring two students and you balanced talking to them both well, and you did a good job getting DeeDee on board and writing out ideas, so great job!
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