First In-class tutoring session thoughts

In my first session, the first thing I will do is be alert and friendly, introduce myself, and ask the name of the tutee. I will then have an informal introduction, and explain what I will be doing with the student. I will say that I am going to help you with your paper, by reading it over, and giving them some tips on how to improve. The strategies I will use are asking the writer what the central issue is of their piece, and to summarize their paper in one or two sentences. Then I will do some outlining, where they can tell me how each body paragraph relates to their thesis if they have one. If the writer is having issues expressing their thesis, I will them have them do a writing exercise where they will write down everything that comes to mind about the topic they are writing about.   I imagine that due to the fact that most of these students will have read the book and discussed in class what their paper is about that they will more or less be familiar about the topic and should not have much problems in figuring out what they want to write about, as Food, Inc. is a touchy subject that everyone can relate to. Problems that might arise in their paper might be structure, organization and clear representation of their thesis, along with maybe some grammatical issues. The writer may be aware of the topic at hand but might not be able to have a definitive argument of the subject. The session will end on a positive note, where I will do a recap on what I think the writer needs to focus and work on, and wish them luck on their paper. 

My Second Writing Center Observation

Upon my second observation in the writing center, I found the tutor to be a little disinterested, she did not seem like she was willing to help her tutee, because the tutee arrived about 10 minutes late for the session. My assumption is that the tutor felt like since the sessions already began, she had a free period until this student showed up. The tutee was an older woman whom English was not her first language. She was practicing for the CATW test, and wanted to know how she could use her time more efficiently and get her thoughts down quicker on paper. The tutor explained to her that she could not teach her how to write faster (which I agree with) but she could help her use strategies to help her understand the text she is reading better, so that she can use it to write about the topic she was reading in a uniformed manner, thus helping her utilize her time better. The tutee then gave her a graded paper she already wrote, which had positive feedback from her professor, but she explained that she wasn't happy with nice or good, because other times she had excellent on her papers. The tutor then let her know the areas she was lacking but did not explain fully what she could have done better. The tutor then left her for about 5 minutes, and came back with some practice CATW worksheets, and explained a great idea that I thought was good for me to use in the future, when analyzing text. She showed the student how to read each paragraph and write notes on the side of the main idea of the paragraph, and use those notes to begin her own paragraphs in her paper. She told her to be very detailed in her explanations on why she felt the paragraph meant what it did. After she demonstrated this process to the student, she had the tutee do two examples on her own. Once the tutee did this, she let her know that the session was closing in five minutes, and that it was time to finish up. I though the tutor should have invited her back to work on it again, but she didnt, she kind of just got up and left before the tutee did. In my opinion, I thought that gave an impression that she didn't want to be bothered. All in all, I think the tutor knows what shes doing and can back up what she is talking about, but her attitude towards the student could have been better.