Aquatic Ecology

I was originally going to write about the first paper I tutored that was in the unfamiliar subject of aquatic ecology. Honestly, that session was a lot of fun. The student was great to work with and I just explained that I wasn't familiar with his area of study, but that I was willing to work through the paper with him. He caught a lot of his own mistakes, I made some writing suggestions and I asked content questions as we went along. In the end it was beneficial for both of us, because I think he got a tighter paper, and I learned a ton about mercury in fish in Weber county. (Don't eat large quantities of fish from any rivers in this area.)

But I just got done tutoring the legions of BioMed papers and now I really feel out of my league! While it has been fun to learn about different types of diseases and problems you can have it's been hard to read through some of the language. They have used large medical terms that I usually just skip over when I am reading it out loud. The students generally think it's funny that I can't pronounce the terms, or that I choose not to pronounce the terms, and I don't mind making them smile. Even though some of the language was difficult, I did not have any problems recognizing writing that could profit from tightening. On one of the papers we worked through proper punctuation. I know it wasn't a paper on string theory, but my lack of knowledge on the subject matter did not hinder me from tutoring the writing of the student.

Sometimes I do have to be careful because I distract myself with wanting to ask questions. When people come in with such interesting papers and subjects I just want to know more. I get so curious about what they are writing. Today one of the papers was about a heart condition called a VSD. Through the whole thing I wanted to ask about its relation to ASDs, but there was a line waiting for tutors and I didn't want to get off track. I did allow myself to ask a couple of questions because I just get so curious! I stayed mostly on track with the one about breast cancer. (applause)

I think the best approach to take with unfamiliar subjects is to just tell the student that you may not understand everything about the text but you can help him/her with his/her writing. Questions are always helpful, and in many cases you can learn a lot from the student. Just be careful about that gray line where you moving from being the tutored to the tutee!