Thoughts About Monday... and Today's Tutoring

Class had a good balance on Monday. An assignment was distributed, some discussion was had about tutoring techniques, and technical aspects of English were reviewed... now there's a well-rounded day in an English classroom. I particularly enjoyed writing my own simple, compound, complex, and compound/complex sentences. Rather than an animal (particularly a dog), I wrote about a chair. The subdivisions of conjunctions and pronouns into specified categories seemed complicated and new to me. These some cognitive feelings were also aroused in me while reading the Grammar Snob over the weekend. I think that first grade was the last time I received a dissertation on possessives. Maybe it's just me, but as I read that chapter I was convinced that the rules had changed since I was a young tot being taught about ending words with apostrophes and s's. I think I understood what the G.S. was saying, but I think it'll be really easy for me to continually revert back to my nascent training in possessivising words.

In my own writing, I guess it wouldn't really bother me if I used a contemporarily incorrect form of possessives, but in the case of a tutoring session (especially one with an ESL student) I'd really like to know what the nitty-gritty modern rules are. It seems that I've tutored more ESL students already this year than I did all of last semester. It's such a different kind of task to tutor someone who knows English in an overtly taught, rather than intrinsically learned, manner. Just today I tutored an English student and then an international student, back-to-back. The American wanted to work on his thesis and the organization of his paper. he told me about the assignment; we read over what he had; and then we discussed his concerns. We talked about how to make his thesis fit in with what he had already written and how to make it organizationally influence the rest of the paper for the better. We brainstormed, and he did some writing on his own. By the time he left, he felt very confident about it. The foreign students was very worried about grammar and other mechanics issues. Interestingly, while we read through her paper, I found that her grammar was better than the American's! We didn't discuss things in a theory and thought driven fashion. Rather, we discussed her concerns in a very technical way. I gave several examples of how exceptional rules apply in certain situations. Amazingly, we got through all of her long paper, and she also felt very good when she left. I think this class is really helping me to reevaluate myself as a tutor, discern which of my tutoring habits are ineffective, and adopt better strategies for helping students who are from diverse backgrounds and who have diverse problems with their writing.

Good job!