The Last Blog...

Oh wow, if I had to start this semester over knowing what I do now, I would have been able to avoid quite a few sessions where I was unsure of what to do. When I signed up to be a tutor, I really had no idea how difficult it might be to explain the actual process of writing to students for whom it does not naturally come to. Explaining grammatical and writing procedural ideas in a clear way so that students understand and can do it themselves without relying on a tutor’s prodding, is a necessary part of effective tutoring. I felt that this class was able to give me effective techniques in order to achieve this goal and make clear to students information and techniques that I inherently understood. I wish that at the beginning of this semester I had already been more familiar with MLA and APA style so that I could speak more confidently about it to my students. Strangely enough though, I thought that the order our classroom lectures went in oddly paralleled my experiences in the writing center, so well in fact that the lessons were fresh in my mind the sessions that the particular subject happened to come up. I also wish I had realized how it is okay for me to not know all of the answers. At the beginning of the semester, I felt terrible when I was not extremely familiar in the subject matter of the paper I was reading. For some reason I felt like because I was the “instructor”, I should not have to ask clarification questions of terms and concepts because I was expected to somehow “know all”. However, after our many classroom discussions on this subject, I now realize that it is actually a good thing to ask such information seeking questions of the student. By them having to explain their topic in detail to a tutor, they might actually come up with better ways of stating their points or come up with added information that can go into their papers. Other tidbits of information I wished I had known would have had to do with certain grammatical principles that I had always known how to write myself, but did not actually know the rules for. This was especially true concerning the rule for semi-colons, which has not only helped my students but also my own writing. Knowing how to verbalize rules that I have never had to before allow me to explain them to students in a way that made sense and could be done without going through multiple examples. Overall, I felt that the information I learned from this class truly helped me to clarify my advice given to students and gave me added information that I would not have had before. I never imagined that the varied needs of individual students would require so many different approaches in a session and would need such pragmatic responses by the tutor. The large variety of the sessions I have had, have all focused on different subjects with a vast expanse in differing problems. I think that I am a better tutor now due to this course.