Blog 12: Has Tutoring Helped My Studies?

Tutoring at the writing center has both improved my regular schoolwork and hindered its progress. Let me explain. As an English major, it is always great to see writing in all of its forms. Good writing, bad writing,  absurd writing: It all helps. From the really excellent pieces I was able to tutor, I was able to steal ideas for future papers. I was able to witness new organizational schemes and recognize what it looked like when tried and true writing techniques were adhered to. From the papers that were obviously struggling, I was able to compare my writing and avoid many of the pitfalls writers fall into. After a semester of tutoring, I feel as if I am better prepared to revise my own papers, and the red marks I receive on the papers I have turned in are growing less and less common.

But, as I said, tutoring has also hindered some of my schoolwork. This is not a consequence of being a tutor, though. It has actually been a result of poor planning on my part. In the first half of the semester we filled out some time management forms which detailed our typical, weekly schedules. After mine was filled out, I realized that I only had a couple of hours every week to study for my classes. I had taken on quite the workload, devoting much of my time to tutoring and the rest to classes and sleep. Because of this, my sleep schedule suffered, and consequently, I found it hard to really put the effort into my assignments that I had intended. My grades have not suffered because of this (yet) but personally I feel that I could have done more. In the future, I will try to plan my schedule more evenly and give myself more time to read, study, and write.