My First Tutoring Experience

Earlier this week I had my first tutoring writing adventure. We had never met the students before, so I had no idea of what to expect. However, it turned out to be a very pleasant experience..

My student, Ms. Gonzalez, was a lovely young girl whose parents had come from the Dominican Republic.She was born here and had a very unusual first name, I will have to post it next week since it was so unusual that I can't remember it. She was bright and well mannered.

When she first sat down, we introduced ourselves and exchanged some friendly formalities to break the ice. When we were comfortable, I asked her what her assignment was, and she took out some blue books containing the essays she had been writing for class. I looked them over and saw that her writing was not bad at all. I read the comments written by her professor that stated that her main problem was organization--that her introduction, conclusion and body seemed to be talking about different things. 

Happy to have a starting point, we dug into a discussion about organization. I told her about something I had heard that simplified the process of organization which went like this:

In the introduction, you tell the reader what you are going to say.

In the body, you say it.

In the conclusion you tell them what you said.

She looked at me, amazed, then laughed and said she would remember that for sure. 

I then asked her what her next essay was going to be about. She showed me a paper from the exam book about the fact that good looking men get hired easily but women have a harder time. She seemed to be having a bit of a problem deciding what she was going to say exactly, so I asked her to tell me in one sentence what the essay would be about. She stared at me for a minute, then asked, "One sentence?" Yep, I told her, one sentence. She thought for a minute, then said "Women are discriminated against when they apply for a job because of certain things". Her topic was now narrowed down to a more manageable idea. 

I asked her what those things were. Her first answer was speech. Ok, that was one paragraph in the body. What else? The way they present themselves, she answered. Ok, that's another paragraph. She was getting into rapidly.

I asked her to tell me what an introduction, body and conclusion were. She repeated my little ditty from above. Ok, she was going to mention her points of discrimination in her introduction, talk about them one at a time in her body, then sum it all up in her conclusion. She seemed quite happy with that.

We discussed other things such as putting her own thoughts into the body of her essay instead of just in the  conclusion, as per her professor's notes. She seemed to have ideas already about what she was going to say. Soon the time was up and I told her we would go over her next essay the next time we met. I felt she left with more confidence in writing than she came in with. Isn't that was tutoring is for?? I think so.