i'm sorry i just wanted to say i had a really hard week...my hamster died like 2 days after she gave birth and i was ridiculously attached so i guess i learned my lesson...
I am definitely interested when i tutor an international student. it's very obvious, because people who grow up in the US don't have heavy accents. (and even people who did had a different home life than me which would at the very least affect the reaction to an assignment if not the grammar.) It's fun to examine the ideas they've come up with because sometimes, they're just plain weird- things i wouldn't have ever thought about before reading their paper. I like the insight. i'm extremely curious and this is one way to satisfy my curiosity. i do, however, believe that correcting grammar is important because editing these students' papers it so difficult sometimes because the meaning is lost in translation. i am in no way interested in taking the voice away from them or their paper, i am only interested in helping get their meaning across. it is so apparent in a lot of papers i've read that the grammar is so jumbled i can't figure out what the sentence is actually saying. on top of that, i know our goal is to make everyone a better writer, but i think that our job is to help them with what they want help with. you don't expect a medical doctor to ask you about your emotional problems just like you don't expect a therapist to diagnose influenza...both of them have the ultimate goal of helping you achieve better health, but their jobs are fundamentally very different from one another. we are not teachers- we can't grade them or tell them what to write; we are not muses- we can't inspire their philosophical soul to express itself through the beauty of words (especially words that we can't understand because of jumbled tenses and incorrect diction); we are not mechanics- we can't fix the grammar without addressing the rest of the paper first (which i think you guys missed in my argument earlier...i never said we shouldn't address the global issues of a paper- there's never a time when we shouldn't discuss that with a client- however, helping them form sentences to express the thesis they are trying to write is another story- i look at that as helping them with a global issue, not with sentence-level revision. when sentence level revision is necessary for communication in the basic sense then helping them phrase the thesis seems like the biggest global problem you can possibly help them address and fix!). we are tutors- we are there to help them with what they've asked of us. the way i approach the subject, especially when the student is begging for help with grammar and punctuation, is similar to the action of a mother crushing a pill into a child's food when he won't take his medication. i go through the main points and ask them to point out where they appear (after finding out where the thesis is) and i will only help them with grammar if that particular mistake is relevant to or involves the actual point or thesis. in that way, they see it as me helping them the way they asked me to but in actuality, i am questioning every global issue involved in the writing process. and for the record, i would like to think that i am pretty intelligent and the allegation that i am correcting sentences that are only going to be taken out was kind of offensive. i do have the ability to go through with the student and decide which sentences to leave in the paper and which to take out before i correct a grammar mistake within it. i would not correct a sentence i advised them to remove.
i have never had a student leave (when i was tutoring alone anyway) without feeling better about their paper. i've never had a student tell me they didn't understand how to fix their paper on a global level. i've never had a client leave without a developed thesis and main points to support it- that we've either identified within the paper or that i've questioned out of them. i feel as if because i was willing to acknowledge that students are different and need different kinds of help (which sometimes includes some huge grammar issues) that you guys were taking it as i was a bad tutor or that i had no concern for our goal to improve students as writers on an underlying level. i certainly think about that in every session and i have never approached a consult as a quick fix session. sorry, i had to clear that up...
That does bring me to the next question from the list stephanie gave us though...
Is it ever ok to give students quick fixes?
I would say that depends. if a student comes in with excellent ideas that are well developed and supportive of a strong thesis, them asking for a read-over and some grammar corrections they may have missed in proof-reading is ok. They have a good grasp of the writing process and would i discuss the thesis and main points to see if maybe they could be better? yes. but quick fixes are not bad in this case. i often ask people (roommate or parents, for instance) to read over my paper because sometimes i just miss things. if someone came in and asked for a quick fix when they were missing any other part of a paper that was more important to the writing process, then it's a problem. of course, everything else (almost everything) is more important...
another case where it would be ok is when the mistake appears over and over and is a big problem to that writer. that signifies to me that they do not understand the rule that governs the use of that punctuation or that word. i will fix one sentence to show them the rule, help them fix another, then ask them to show me they can do it on their own. humans learn 90% of the information we take in through imitation. we are social beings and that's how we work.
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