Teaching Students To Think Analytically

I wish we had read this chapter about five weeks ago, or maybe even at the beginning of the semester. (I know that has been documented, but I just wanted to re-enforce the idea). The concepts in Rafoth's article are essential to tutoring students. I had a student come in at the beginning of the semester and most of her paper was one gigantic quote. It was kind of funny. We began reading her paper and she led into a quote. I thought, "this is good, she knows she needs some backup information." But then she kept reading and reading and I kept looking for the ending quotation marks and they did not come until the end of the page. The whole page was a quote! I tried explaining to her that usually quotes are smaller and should only be used to supplement her own words. By the end of the third page, when I kept telling her she would have to cut out most of the quote and re-write she was becoming a little hostile. I don't know if explaining the idea of quotes to her as a backup singer would have worked, but maybe the metaphor would have helped her understand. I kept trying to gently suggest she use her own words, but she didn't understand why, when the quote she had copied and pasted sounded great and was exactly what she wanted to say. I would like to try the session again and use the words, "backup singers" to see if that strikes her fancy. She may understand that quotes are used to support her own ideas, not negate her own ideas. At least she put quote marks around it and did not pass it off as her own writing. We're all grateful for small favors sometimes.

I also liked the explanation of complicating a person's thesis. I had another student come in who had a thesis which did encompass her paper, but it was similar to the thesis "This is bull." She said she had gotten some feedback about her thesis and that it needed to be expanded, so I read it and then tried to explain why her thesis was okay, but could use some work. We read her whole paper and I gave her some suggestions for complicating the thesis, but at the time I did not know how to talk about complicating the thesis. I knew it needed to happen, but I wasn't sure how to explain the concept to the student. I guess it's much like grammar. We all know how to use the language and it makes sense to us, but we often lack the tools to talk about grammar or language rules. She seemed to understand my suggestions, so let's hope her thesis improved slightly and she did well on her paper.

While I do not propose that we have even more reading at the beginning of this class, some of these readings would be helpful to have right off so we can be given the tools to talk about the things we are trying to teach the students. The more comfortable we feel talking about writing the more comfortable we will feel helping students with their papers.