April 25th,

Today we just went to tutor for the first time, and it was more than interesting. Being consumed with nervousness I felt a little hesitant. Struggling a little bit with a language barrier with on student i felt that i could have done a lot better then what I've done, but she know i was little nervous..

We as a group, read and understood the main idea of what they were supposed to talk about in their papers. I pick one student because of the amount and the curiousness she had when we walked in. We spoke for a minute about how she felt, and I begin reading what she had. Mainly her ideas were interesting and quite good, yet she was struggling from not understanding English perfectly, her sentence structure was a bit choppy. Understanding what she was trying to say, i felt that her paper would be a lot better if she added more information about how she felt, being a mother, and first hand witnessing the propagandist views from TV. We spoke about how things could be "beefed" up a little in certain parts, and in others, how she could incorporate more information to give not only one, but a few ideas to back up her thesis.

For the other student, she had a lot of great ideas, and not a lot of problems with her writing. Yet, she needed help structuring her ideas into complete paragraphs and giving supporting facts. While reading over her work I saw miner small LOC's throughout the paper, but nothing out of the ordinary. Working with her, on graphs and diagrams to help her correct later, I had her write down supporting ideas/ facts to motivate her to write a little more supportive information to back up her claims. With her personal life and personal experience she stated key points but just moved away from them without any supporting facts. I insisted to have make a diagram and jot down more information to help lay into her paper to give more facts about her claim.


 Personally i felt a bit overwhelmed through out the session because I was thinking (and i still do) feel I didn't do as much as I could have done, or maybe I didn't help them at all. I'm worried that might just have confused them a bit more then what they've already felt and being I wanted to just write down more ideas, I made myself just help them with major ideas that they stated already.
The most positive part of the session was that they both said I helped them out, if not a lot, a little. Making me feel like I did a good job, and that alone was very gratifying. Helping students when stuck, and giving them more information to look up, search and experience on their own is very intriguing.


I found myself focused on each student for more then 10 minutes because of getting caught up in the conversations we were having. Allowing more ideas and facts in conversation, I let them have a few minutes to gather their thoughts and write down the answers to the questions I left them.
After a few minutes I asked how everything was going, and they both said fine and when I came back to them they had several ideas jotted on the page. Making me feel like I am doing my job well.

 Next time I'll be more prepared mentally so I'll be able to just walk in, read the assignment and start taking notes bast on their words and conversations.


 Next time, I'll be ready for anything and not be nervous..