Tutoring Love

This was definitely one of the most intimidating tutoring sessions that I've ever been in. It wasn't hard in terms of working with the student to improve the paper; it was hard in the sense that I had two classmates and one teacher observing me. These factors made me feel slightly uncomfortable before the session, during the session, and after the session. For better or for worse, I thought very carefully about everything I did and said.

The paper was horrendous, which made it difficult to know what the focus of our session should be. When Sarah had made the priority that we should concentrate on clarity and persuasiveness, I was thinking in terms of the overall flow of the paper. Because of this, I didn't take the time to address technical errors. Even with omitting the process of correcting those mistakes, it still took us a long time to get through the paper because we'd brainstorm how to improve each individual paragraph, and then she'd rewrite it. Because of this, we didn't get through the whole paper. This situation of not completing a paper occurs in many of my sessions. Previously, I've thought that that was okay. My thoughts were that after reworking the first part of the paper, students would then know how to approach the rest of the paper on their own or with a friend. While thinking about it during class, though, I think that I'd feel cheated if I took my paper to the writing center and the tutor wasn't able to help me with all of it. Somehow, I need to figure out how to do both: get through the entire paper and help students resolve their concerns.