Tutoring

Turing 4:
In my fourth tutoring session I got a client who came in and said to me "I've been here already and done all that other stuff so now I'm here just for grammar." I tried to kindly explain to him that we don't just do grammar but that I could point out reoccurring problems as we went through the paper while also looking at "the other stuff". He reiterated that he didn't want help with that, he just wanted me to look at his grammar and fix it. That's where I sighed and just started to go through the paper with him. He had this weird thing with putting (his own voice) in a style like that. I pointed out that you could use either a semi-colon or a colon depending on the circumstance. He asked what the difference was between them so on the side of his page I drew a diagram of the different types of punctuation. I only saw about two or three grammar mistakes, it sort of bewildered me that he had come in with this demand for grammar help when he obviously didn't need that much help with it. All he had to do was go through the paper on his own and he probably would have caught those mistakes. It was sort of a tense session and I was relieved when it was over.


Tutoring 5:
In my fifth tutoring session I had a student come in with a research paper. He told me he had spoken with his professor and she had told him that he need to limit the amount of cited facts he was putting into each paragraph. He asked me for advice on what to cut and how to cut out the information without leaving the paragraphs choppy.His paper was on comparing the political careers of our current presidential candidates. When we got to the first paragraph I was fairly alarmed. I started by suggesting that he take out certain unimportant information and also deleting the in depth details that he didn't need and were just adding length to the paragraph not support. Then I started to approach the fact that he didn't really have an argument in the paragraph that he was trying to support. He just had a lot of information about McCain's military career. I asked him what the paragraph was supposed to be arguing and he said he was really just trying to talk about McCain's military experience. I pointed out to him that by doing so he was just retelling fact after fact from whatever website he had gone to and that there was no "him" in the paragraph, he was never pointing out his own interesting view in the paper. We spent twenty minutes trying to figure out a better way to write the first paragraph. After that I tried to just focus on broad ideas that he could use in each of his paragraphs because it was obvious to me that this paper was not at all ready to be turned in. It was all cited facts and no new and interesting view points which are usually what teachers are looking for in a research paper, and according to his assignment sheet this was no exception.