Holy Mahogany Batman!

Trying to steer clear of the rhetorical questions that usually begin my blog postings, I will say this: ESL students are awesome. That being said, the one thing I wish that I had done at the beginning of the semester is keep a journal in my folder to record the positive and negative aspects of the individual sessions that I had. I took the time to write down what I could have done differently after a bad session once and it helped a lot. I felt like I had something to show for my session, and that I could improve next time because it forced me to take the time to analyze what happened, and how I could possibly avoid those problems in coming sessions. Though I haven't really looked at it since, I have that paper to refer back to when I need it, like right now for instance. Right now I'm really wishing I knew what it was that I wrote down, and all I have to do is take a short trip over to the Writing Center and it's in my grasp. I can remember the majority of my sessions if I search my brain long enough, but it really is nice to have that quick, permanent access to the knowledge that I've acquired- and again, it made me think about things that I would have otherwise probably fretted about, then discharged. It's an incredibly useful tool - I really need to go and get one.
In other breaking news, I wish that I had known that I was definitely going to be at Weber State this spring. I would have been able to get much more tutoring done, and I think that I would have approached the whole process with a different attitude.
I actually don’t think I could have learned what I’ve learned this semester any other way, I mean it’s nice to talk about going off and reading all of the literature there is on tutoring and seeing Victor Villanueva in person, and how much of a difference it could make if we had done that all immediately (or at all), but I don’t think that the readings that I have done could have been applied at all really if we hadn’t been doing the tutoring all along, it changed my learning process because it had direct and immediate application to what I was doing, and though that caused me to flounder sometimes, I believe that learning about tutoring this way, to quote Ebenezer Scrooge’s Nephew “has done me good, and will do me good.” I do wish that I would have known more grammar, I do wish that I would have known more intrinsically that messing up was going to happen, and I wish that I knew initially that 20 minutes was not what it was going to take me starting out doing sessions, or in a lot of cases period, simply because of the nature of the session. Still working on that one. Time management during sessions is often still something that eludes me and though I know this is a great way to learn it, if I could have one thing implanted into my brain artificially, it would be that.