My second tutoring session was with a girl working on a paper for her physics class. Her class read a book and had to compare the challenges the physicists to challenges she had in her own life. She brought in her paper that had been corrected by her teacher and wanted me to make sure she had fixed what her teacher had pointed out and make sure her organization was good. I went over the paper paragraph by paragraph with her and pointed out any parts of her paper that did not fit with the rest of it. In each paragraph she was missing an intro sentence, she just jumped right into what she was talking about without setting it up. I explained to her that she needed both the intro sentence and the closing sentence so that the reader can follow her train of thought, especially because she was writing a comparative paper.
My third tutoring session was definitely once in a lifetime. I didn't have a scheduled client and about five minutes after sessions started a graduate student walked in. He was somewhere in his thirties and I immediately felt completely not the right tutor for him. I may be 18 years old but I look like I'm 16! I was afraid this man wouldn't take me seriously or would feel like he was getting the short end of the stick. I greeted him and we took our seats next to each other, I asked him what his paper was about and he told me he was writing to try and apply for a type of scholarship that would allow him to finish his final year at MSU without having to be a TA. He was an art major so he showed me a piece of his art so I could have a picture in my mind about what we were working on. His paper was divided into sections about his artwork, his performance artwork, and finally his performance piece that he is currently developing. We went through the paper and pointed out where he didn't have enough information for the reader to be able to visualize what he was talking about and how that was extremely important in a paper you are writing about art because the reader needs to be able to see in his minds eye what my tutee was talking about. That was really the main focus of our session. A final note: my student said to me "Far out!" after we finished one of his paragraphs! Crazy.
My observation at the library was very interesting. I ended up observing the yawner!! The tutor who had yawned through my entire paper. What was really bizarre was that he preformed this session almost to the tee the same way he preformed mine. The student came in, the tutor read his paper allowed as one whole chunk. As he went through he pointed out words that didn't belong or grammar mistakes. When he got done reading the paper he told the student that he assumed the student just wanted him to fine tune the paper. The student just nodded along. It was insane to me that the session had no tutor and student interaction at all. Another thing I noticed was that the student took the "turned off" behavior, he leaned back in his chair and took himself out of action with the paper. After the ten minute session the student left, in my mind, empty handed. The tutor then turned to me and asked me what exactly I was observing for. I told him and he said that I probably didn't observe his best session because he had been in and out of the hospital for the past week or more and just wasn't doing his best work. He said that if he had been feeling better he would have gone over many more things in the paper with the student. That puzzled me. If you know that you aren't doing your best work and helping the student to the best of your ability, should you really be at work? I just didn't quite understand that logic especially because I felt that the session I had with him was a complete waste of my time and if that had been my very first experience with the writing center I would not have gone back.
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