Cross to Help? & Peer Evaluation Sheets
Crossing the line eh? This week has been somewhat frustrating for me. After six hours of sitting in a writing lab, I don’t have a minute of tutoring time. At least I haven’t crossed the line. The majority of my tutoring time, as I think I have stated in past bloggs, has been spent with ESL students fixing grammar. I do not think crossing the line was too much of an issue in these sessions. However, I have been involved in a few sessions where crossing the line could have easily become an issue.
Luckily in one of the sessions, although something was obviously wrong with the paper, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. So I was left to asking questions the whole time while the writer made marks on her paper. I’m not sure how much that helped or even if it made her writing or paper better, but again, at least I didn’t cross the line. This experience makes me think about the part in the chapter when she says that tutors need to push themselves and find where the line is. If this doesn’t happen, in many cases, the tutor may not be effective. Is it better to cross the line than to not help your tutee? I don’t know.
I really enjoyed reading Ammon’s blog. His suggestions to keep from crossing the line were very helpful. I like the Idea of having your own personal back up map for when the writer does not have anything specific he wants to work on.
One thing that has been helpful in my beginnings as a tutor is to simply follow the peer evaluations sheets that many of the 1010 students bring us. This isn’t foolproof, and sometimes may not be the best approach to help a writer improve, but for the most part it helps me stay in bounds when evaluating a paper.
I also just read the chapter about tutoring in emotionally charged sessions and think it applies a lot to crossing the line. The last student I tutored had written a paper on how a personal experience had changed her life. She wrote about how her dad ran out of the family when she was young. If it had not been for the peer evaluation sheet she was required to have me fill out, I could have crossed the line somewhere or even made the session more emotional than it had to be. To some, these peer evaluation sheets may seem elementary but I think they help both the tutor and tutee immensely.
Luckily in one of the sessions, although something was obviously wrong with the paper, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. So I was left to asking questions the whole time while the writer made marks on her paper. I’m not sure how much that helped or even if it made her writing or paper better, but again, at least I didn’t cross the line. This experience makes me think about the part in the chapter when she says that tutors need to push themselves and find where the line is. If this doesn’t happen, in many cases, the tutor may not be effective. Is it better to cross the line than to not help your tutee? I don’t know.
I really enjoyed reading Ammon’s blog. His suggestions to keep from crossing the line were very helpful. I like the Idea of having your own personal back up map for when the writer does not have anything specific he wants to work on.
One thing that has been helpful in my beginnings as a tutor is to simply follow the peer evaluations sheets that many of the 1010 students bring us. This isn’t foolproof, and sometimes may not be the best approach to help a writer improve, but for the most part it helps me stay in bounds when evaluating a paper.
I also just read the chapter about tutoring in emotionally charged sessions and think it applies a lot to crossing the line. The last student I tutored had written a paper on how a personal experience had changed her life. She wrote about how her dad ran out of the family when she was young. If it had not been for the peer evaluation sheet she was required to have me fill out, I could have crossed the line somewhere or even made the session more emotional than it had to be. To some, these peer evaluation sheets may seem elementary but I think they help both the tutor and tutee immensely.
posted by Anonymous at 2:12 PM
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