Two students

At the beginning of the semester, Dr. Fishman and Mrs. Ramirez said we shouldn't work more than 3 hours at a time. I didn't necessarily believe them when they said we'd get stressed out, but after these last two weeks, I've changed my mind.

I know I'm not the only one that'd gotten swamped. The majority have been lab reports - another day of brewer's yeast cell labs and I could replicate the process at home from memory - but I've also had a few ENGL200-level students.

I wanted to write down my thoughts on two students.

The first is actually a pair of students who came in for help with their yeast cell labs. I had worked with them both before, but today Ali took one (Student A) while the other (Student B) waited while I finished up with another student. I looked over Student B's paper and it was really well-written. There were maybe a couple of grammatical mistakes, but nothing big. I asked her about her last lab, and she said she only had a few points taken off for grammar - everything else was perfect. Ali had to leave so I took over with Student A. She needs a lot of help with run-on sentences and comma usage. Since Students A and B always come in together, I wanted to tell them that if Student B would look over Student A's paper, she wouldn't need to come to the Writing Center. I know that's not necessarily the way we work, but it just seems odd that two totally different writers would be friends and not willing to help each other out.

The second situation was with an English student (Student C) in a 400-level class. After a day of reading labs, the paper on Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams was a welcome change. But I had a problem. With the labs, I mainly read for grammatical mistakes and sentence structure. I'll read the science out loud (or have the student read it) and ask them if it makes sense. I don't know the science, so that part is up to them. As I read over C's paper, I found myself chugging along, checking for errors in grammar and sentence structure. I got through a page or so and realized I had no idea what I had read. It wasn't that C's paper made no sense. Rather, I was just so focused on grammatical errors that the content and meaning of the paper had escaped me. I had to start over, refocus, and read closer.

I think the "close" readings I'm doing with literature in other classes are helping with my tutoring, and vice versa. Once I got a handle on C's paper, I started asking questions like, "What does this word mean for you here?" and "Why is this sentence important." C had a tendency to use words that sounded nice, regardless of their importance to the paper. By pinning the student down (nicely), you make them think more about their word choice.

The situations with these two students aren't related (except that both the paper and lab were due within hours), but both are helping me grow as a tutor. I'm adjusting my tutoring style depending on the student, and I'm trying to ask the questions that get students thinking.