First Session of the Semester

Hello again!

                Wow! The first week has come and gone and I just had my first tutoring session today. (Technically, this is not my first ever in the Writing Center because I was an intern last semester, but it was the first session of this year!  J) I was pretty nervous jumping back into the saddle after having the whole summer off for my brain to rot and my English skills to be filtered down the toilet, but sometimes plunging back in is easier than waiting. Thankfully, the first session of the semester was a good one.

                The lady had come in for English 1010 tutoring. Her professor is requiring that all of his 1010 students come into the Writing Center at least three times during the semester and she wanted to get it over with early on. I really like being friendly and natural with students, so I tried to be nice and put on a smile for this woman who also seemed to be smiling a lot. Her assignment: write two lies and a truth, but make them all believable. No restrictions. No specific instructions. No specific length. In essence, the assignment was a free for all. Personally, I think the professor just wants to see where his students are in their writing and to let their creative juices flow. The student I got definitely got creative with the assignment.

                During the session, I tried to read through the different sections of the paper before I went back and did some correcting and suggesting. I used the dot method and just marked the places where I saw things I wanted to talk about after I had finished reading the section. Because there were no restrictions on the paper, I wanted to leave it up to her how she wanted to put forth her ideas. I did not want to talk about structure too much because the assignment did not call for it. Rather, we went over minor things that I noticed, such as multiple points of view and IC, DC comma rules. She was so excited to learn about those rules because she did not even notice that they were a problem. It was exciting to see her learn something new. I felt like her biggest “Aha” moment came when I was talking about how it is frowned upon to use contractions in academic writing. She just kind of lit up and exclaimed that she did not even know that that was a rule. I felt like during our session she was actually learning something, which gave me great joy. Not only did she learn things from me, but I learned a few things from her laid back, whimsical style that I may want to use in my own writing.

                By the end of the session, I felt that we had covered a lot of new concepts. She seemed very satisfied by our progress and really wanted to come back again soon for another session. I really felt like I had had the tools to explain concepts to her in correct English terms. I thought that it went very well and I actually felt excited about her paper and how much she had learned. Not bad for my first tutoring session of the semester.