Tutee and Observer

Today I completed my WC visitations as a tutee and an observer. I'll begin with the tutee session:

It was very surprising, to be honest. As I said below, I purposely chose someone I didn't know--a grad student from a different department--so I could compare how things went last time when my tutor was also my friend and part of my cohort. I intentionally took in the same documents (my three teaching philosophy statements) that I wanted to synthesize for the job market. Because I didn't know this young man, I thought we could get a lot done. But no, we didn't. First I read the three documents to him. Then he made a suggestion about my introduction, and jotted it down, then began an outline. We worked together (actually he did more of the talking/writing) to make an outline of where this document could go--and then we were done! It took maybe 20 minutes. I don't know if this was my fault because I didn't have as many questions as I did when I worked with J. before or if it was him not knowing where to go next, but we had quite a nice chat for the next half hour. Hmm...

The session I observed was significantly more interesting. Since last time I observed someone rather new, I thought this time I'd observe someone more seasoned. I'll call him N. and his tutee A. A. was an international student, but I never did quite pin down where he was from. He had an Asian/MidEastern coloring and black hair, but a very distinctive accent that was more German or Russian. Never did figure it out. Anyway, he had a 19-page paper on the reasons for WWII and needed two more pages and help with grammar.

I noticed several things: One, N. was very good at focusing on higher order concerns--mostly organization in this case--and on leading the student into finding answers on his own. The odd thing was, though, that he had the student read portions here and there of the paper but never the whole thing and never in order. This gave me a bit of concern about his ability to discuss organization, but I noticed that he asked A. how his paper was organized, they talked about it, and N. could make suggestions and had ideas without even actually reading the paper! We noticed most of the same things, too, like wordiness (as a result of trying to "invent the university", a real obvious stab at academic discourse gone wrong). And while this tutor did a significant amount of talking, most of it was him doing some "active reading" (sort of like "active listening with a twist) where he listened to A. read and then asked him, "Is this what you mean here?" and he would paraphrase. If he was right, they moved on. If he was off, the stayed there to clarify. it worked quit well, especially considering the length of the paper.