Record of Observations (2G Stuff)

Hey everyone,

Just a quick update on my tutoring experience. I formally completed (no eavesdropping) two of the assigned observations today (just in time), bringing my total up to 2 third-party observations and 1 as a client. I may be responding to 2G a little late, but that's only because I didn't have any worthwhile experiences until today, ha ha.

The first was my third-party in the second hour of day (my head is spinning), with Kassidy as the client (our mutual friend and acquaintance) and Jenny as the consultant. One of the first things I noticed was how quickly Jenny got to work, getting Kassidy to read his papers (two of 'em) out loud. She took notes silently while he read as to not interrupt the flow. She had her own copy, as well, for her personal notes. What struck me about this session was her speed and efficiency in coming up with ways to counter some, what I would assume, common problems that clients bring in. We even had time to go over a second paper that Kass brought in for kicks. One concern: we could have used a thesaurus. A good portion of our involuntary pauses were spent thinking of synonyms.

Later on, I brought in a paper of my own to get a fellow consultant's reaction. Abby was my consultant, who had me go through the basic steps (reading aloud to get a feel for the paper). First impression: I found more awkward wordings in my prose than I would have liked to find. This paper was a summary/reflection on a biography of Martin Heidegger, a early 20th century German philosopher. Not exciting. At all. Abby made it clear that having audience in mind is, of course important (my professor and only my professor, who is an expert on Heidegger), but working under an assumed knowledge of your audience's familiarity with the subject does not avail your paper if you don't explain information that a neophyte would need to know. Basically, I took it for granted (at points) that my audience might not have known what I meant about "biological exclusivism" concerning neo-Kantian Lebensphilosophie. Hell, I don't even know. In my defense, it was written Friday afternoon, long after I gave a care about what went into school that week and mere hours before Precious Weekend Time. In short, that was the most important thing I learned.

Abby's approach to tutoring is quite hands-on; so much so that I wasn't sure (at first) how I'd feel about getting critiqued. Tutoring, it seems, no matter how "peer" oriented it strives to be, still might end up putting the client in a defensive position, especially if the client is as demanding on himself/herself as I am. Thankfully, I didn't care much about this paper, but if I did, I know that Abby would be the one to handle it. One technique of hers that I will soon appropriate concerns the use of extraneous punctuation (like parentheses) and what use -- if any -- these marks lend to the overall flow and composition of the paper.

Her best advice, though, was a kind of informal formula: three aspects of a good sentence, a triad of which I will call "voice", "force" and "point". She felt that the best sentences in the paper kept an appropriate balance of the writer's personal style, biting and directive (and short) language, and a strong sense of what said sentence is trying to accomplish. The weakest focus too much on joking around (somebody? anybody?), or vastly try to overcomplicate the veracity of the phrase's intuitive magnitude by ostentatiously exacerbating the verisimilitude explicitly present. They try too hard. That one part took me 4 minutes to write.

Would I get tutored again? Of course. It's required. But more than that, I learned quite a bit about how our colleagues approach different challenges when it comes to tutoring, and only experience can tell me more about what we as UWC's can do to make things... sound... gooder.