Observation 2 and Primary Consultant 5

Outside observation
My second observation was at the BCC (very conveniently close to where I live). I've heard other people talk about going to the BCC, but I still wasn't sure exactly what to expect. It turned out to be comfortable, attractive, and pretty laid-back feeling, which I liked, especially compared to observing in the Library (which, in my opinion, is not laid-back at all). The client I observed was working on a resume that actually looked fine to me, except for her font choice, which I thought looked too bubbly or round or something, but the consultant either thought that was fine or chose not to comment. I didn't actually read through the resume myself though, which turned out to need more work because his categories were not labeled in a conventional way and he wrote everything out where bullet points would have been fine. The tutor suggested some things that I thought sounded more like personal preferences rather than essential guidelines, but I didn't really disagree with any of them. By far the most difficult part of that session for me was the TV. I never watch TV or even listen to music when I have to read or write something because I cannot concentrate that way. My attention was constantly divided between the session and the news, which made me glad that I was not the tutor. All in all, the BCC seems like a pleasant tutoring atmosphere, but too distracting for someone like me who really depends on relative quiet. I looked around at one point to see if any of the tutors or clients in sessions were distracted by the TV and it didn't seem like any of them were, but my guess is that that's not always the case.

Leading session(s)
This past Wednesday I led two sessions in a row with ESL students. This has happened before, but this time turned out to be an interesting and kind of difficult experience because the issues that each client had were very, very different. I found it really hard to switch right from one area of focus to another. For example, my first client (with whom I had a two-hour session, probably part of the reason I had trouble switching focus) had a lot of trouble forming logical English sentence structure. Many of her sentences just didn't make sense. I asked her what she meant so many times I ended up trying to think of a different way to ask that question since I was pretty sure my client had to be tired of hearing it. When she explained what she meant, a lot of things became much easier to understand. We ended up using a lot of her almost direct quotations as sentences in her paper to replace ones she'd previously written. I could tell that she struggled with explaining things to me sometimes, so I often asked follow-up questions to make sure that I didn't misinterpret her words, which I think I'd be very annoyed by if I were in her shoes. One thing that really helped our session was that she had a very good knowledge of English grammatical terms and concepts. If I said that something she wrote as an adjective had a different noun form, she knew exactly what I meant and often corrected her mistakes herself. The second client, however, had almost no trouble composing logical English sentences (there were some interesting phrases though, such as "this part of the essay really lights my bulb," which didn't sound like a native speaker's word choices, but I decided to do nothing more than smile inwardly and move on) but kind of surprisingly had little knowledge of grammatical concepts, almost no knowledge of different types of punctuation, and had a lot of trouble re-phrasing troublesome sentences aloud. When I would ask her what she meant, she would often repeat almost word-for-word what she'd written and I would have to think of other ways to try and figure out what she meant. In the end, both clients seemed happy when they left, and I felt like I'd actually helped them, but I also felt communicationally burned out.