Crossing the line. SNOGBLOPG
I’ve had a few times where I’ve crossed the line in a tutoring session. Mostly it happens when a student isn’t as engaged as I’d like them to be, the session becomes awkward, and I become uncomfortable. I feel like they just want me to tell them what to do, and sometimes I find myself going along with it just so I can get the session over with. Other times, I get mad at what’s happened and I just ask the student more questions in hopes that they will realize that I’m not there to tell them what to do and that they need to tell me their ideas no matter what those ideas are.
I can usually tell I’ve crossed the line when I start telling the student how they could word something they wanted to add but couldn’t think of a way to say it. If the student isn’t generating ideas on their own or they don’t feel confident to share what their coming up with, they usually want to take my idea of what to say and use it in their paper. I also tend to take over after we’ve talked about the larger issues of the paper and begin to focus on major punctuation errors. Sometimes I’m not sure how to tell the student there is an error in the paper without telling them how to correct it. I’ve used questioning techniques to try to lead the student to realize what type of mistake it is, but this doesn’t always work. I’m still figuring out how to handle this.
It didn’t take me very long to develop the sense of when I was crossing the line in a tutoring session when it came to taking over. I knew as soon as I started talking and writing more than the student, the line had been crossed. However, I’m still having trouble recognizing when I’m overwhelming the student. When they ask a question I know a lot about, I tend to tell them absolutely everything, and it’s only when I’m done talking that I realize they may not have wanted to hear all of what I said. This actually happened today. A student came in with a question of how to cite an internet source in MLA format. This subject is not even very exciting to me, but I found myself going on and on about it. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped and asked if what I was saying was helpful. I don’t think this is the ideal situation, and I want to be better at gauging how much information the student really wants. I think some of the questions from our text book will be helpful, like asking if this is what they want to focus on or finding out if the things I’m talking about are what they had in mind for their paper. Hopefully by doing this, I’ll eventually be better able to evaluate the needs of the student.
I can usually tell I’ve crossed the line when I start telling the student how they could word something they wanted to add but couldn’t think of a way to say it. If the student isn’t generating ideas on their own or they don’t feel confident to share what their coming up with, they usually want to take my idea of what to say and use it in their paper. I also tend to take over after we’ve talked about the larger issues of the paper and begin to focus on major punctuation errors. Sometimes I’m not sure how to tell the student there is an error in the paper without telling them how to correct it. I’ve used questioning techniques to try to lead the student to realize what type of mistake it is, but this doesn’t always work. I’m still figuring out how to handle this.
It didn’t take me very long to develop the sense of when I was crossing the line in a tutoring session when it came to taking over. I knew as soon as I started talking and writing more than the student, the line had been crossed. However, I’m still having trouble recognizing when I’m overwhelming the student. When they ask a question I know a lot about, I tend to tell them absolutely everything, and it’s only when I’m done talking that I realize they may not have wanted to hear all of what I said. This actually happened today. A student came in with a question of how to cite an internet source in MLA format. This subject is not even very exciting to me, but I found myself going on and on about it. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped and asked if what I was saying was helpful. I don’t think this is the ideal situation, and I want to be better at gauging how much information the student really wants. I think some of the questions from our text book will be helpful, like asking if this is what they want to focus on or finding out if the things I’m talking about are what they had in mind for their paper. Hopefully by doing this, I’ll eventually be better able to evaluate the needs of the student.
posted by Anonymous at 10:37 PM
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