July 18 2013
In today's English 220 class, we were able to go tutor English 101 students, I had the pleasure of meeting two very different individuals Nolan and Kelvin. Their assignment consisted of writing whether they believe Biculturalism was a strength to students or did it just produce confusion. both Nolan and Kelvin's perspective of Biculturalism was positive; however, they did not have the evidence from a text or a CUNY source to provide for their essay.
Since both Nolan and Kelvin had not researched their sources I proceeded to help them with an outline for their paper. i directed Kelvin to read again the assignment and the text he had in mind and write down bullet points of what he wants to portray in his paper, while i helped Nolan clarify his point of view on paper. i also asked Nolan to give me a suggestion of the text he would use and how it relates to the assignment and his point of view. after Nolan was busy looking for information from the text to write down i started helping Kelvin with his outline, i asked him why he thought Biculturalism was a strength and he told me several important reasons and afterwards i expanded on some of the reasons he talked about which i felt would enormously contribute to his paper. i then asked Kelvin which story he would tie his paper to and he chose " Mother Tongue " and i told him to write down why he thought this would be a good source and he later composed a thesis of what he wrote. Nolan was a different story. after viewing the text he wanted to use for his paper i decided the text was more against Biculturalism, once i questioned Neil on how he would connect the text to his point of view , he could not think of any idea so he eliminated that as a choice and decided to instead later look for a CUNY article. I was only able to provide an outline with Nolan and a brief introduction to his paper since he did not have his sources yet.
It was an exciting and new experience, i discovered how eclectic your tutoring has to be, what might work with one student might not work for another. although Nolan followed my instructions on creating an outline he was absent minded in which i had to keep motivating him to spark critical thinking. Kelvin was an easy going student i mainly had to just guide him with the paper he wanted to create. Overall it was good way to build experience for future teaching.
I had an similar experience.I liked how you kept motivating the student that was not well prepared. I also liked how you seem to have had a plan in which you set up one student to do a task and then guided the other student who needed more help. I had to do the same thing, I had two student that was two different individuals. One was smooth sailing and knew what he wanted and we worked from there and took notes and write down ideas. The other student knew what he wanted kind of but was very chatty and energetic and didn't really care for the paper he was just there to be there. But its good that you forced yourself to help them so that they can do the same thing and worked harder on their paper.
ReplyDeleteThis was very interesting to read, because one you had to deal with two totally different students and work accordingly to their paces. The student that did not have much resources, and couldn't think of anything at the moment can be a little frustrating at first but you pulled it off by constantly asking him questions to spark a conversation. It was good that you gave the other student a guideline for his paper which will benefit him when he is writing. For me a guide is always helpful, so I know it will work.
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