Ask questions and use smelly lotion
My thinking about tutoring has changed somewhat this semester. The biggest challenge for me was adjusting to walk-in tutoring. At first I thought it was weird to tutor an almost entirely new set of people every day. I didn’t know how much I was going to like it because I didn’t think I was going to get to know anybody very well. After the first couple of months of tutoring, I realized that there are people who come in to the center often, and I like to keep up with their progress. It’s good to try to make connections with the students because it’s fun to help someone with multiple assignments and see improvement.
My second concern about walk-in tutoring was crossing the line. Because I had to assess a new student’s needs and provide help in such a short amount of time, I had to resist the temptation to tell the student exactly what to do with the paper instead of using techniques to help him/her become a better writer. I soon found out that I had to ask loads of questions at the beginning of the session before we read the paper together, so I could come up with the best way of helping the student, while at the same time setting some expectations for the session. During the first few weeks, I would ask one or two questions, read the paper with the student, and then ask questions about what they were concerned about. This resulted in longer, less effective sessions because neither of us knew what we should do until 5 or 10 minutes into the session. I have found that asking a lot questions about the assignment and what the student did with it gives me an idea of how to best help the student. It took me a while to establish some questions that seemed to work, and this is something I’m still working on.
Something a little less serious but still completely important I’ve learned this semester is that a lot of people have bad breath. Something that’s been effective for me in dealing with this is to put on some really great-smelling lotion before my shift, and if anyone’s breath is offending me, I just put my hand up near my nose, like I’m resting my head, and I just end up smelling the great lotion the whole time. Maybe I’ll give the Writing Center a huge bottle of smelly lotion for Christmas.
Anyway, I would say that new tutors should focus on caring about the students you tutor. When you care about the students, you’ll get the hang of all the aspects of tutoring writing because you’ll want to learn for more reasons than getting a grade, and you’ll have a lot of fun.
My second concern about walk-in tutoring was crossing the line. Because I had to assess a new student’s needs and provide help in such a short amount of time, I had to resist the temptation to tell the student exactly what to do with the paper instead of using techniques to help him/her become a better writer. I soon found out that I had to ask loads of questions at the beginning of the session before we read the paper together, so I could come up with the best way of helping the student, while at the same time setting some expectations for the session. During the first few weeks, I would ask one or two questions, read the paper with the student, and then ask questions about what they were concerned about. This resulted in longer, less effective sessions because neither of us knew what we should do until 5 or 10 minutes into the session. I have found that asking a lot questions about the assignment and what the student did with it gives me an idea of how to best help the student. It took me a while to establish some questions that seemed to work, and this is something I’m still working on.
Something a little less serious but still completely important I’ve learned this semester is that a lot of people have bad breath. Something that’s been effective for me in dealing with this is to put on some really great-smelling lotion before my shift, and if anyone’s breath is offending me, I just put my hand up near my nose, like I’m resting my head, and I just end up smelling the great lotion the whole time. Maybe I’ll give the Writing Center a huge bottle of smelly lotion for Christmas.
Anyway, I would say that new tutors should focus on caring about the students you tutor. When you care about the students, you’ll get the hang of all the aspects of tutoring writing because you’ll want to learn for more reasons than getting a grade, and you’ll have a lot of fun.
posted by Anonymous at 10:39 PM
1 Comments:
Yeah-- I like the lotion idea too. If you put bottle of smelly lotion in the Writing Center, I would use it. :)
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