Thoughts on Tutoring

  So the first tutoring session has come and gone.  My thoughts?  My biggest worry going into the session came to reality when my tutee, Liang, didn't show up with a paper for us to review.  He did have the assignment and article so we started the session by reading the article.  I asked questions about what the main idea of the article and what did he write about.  I tried helping my tutee develop his ideas and work on his thesis.  He was interested in transitional phrases and words so the last 15 minutes of the session was spent on that.

I was surprised at how fast the session went.  We could have easily spent another 30 minutes talking about his paper that wasn't even there.  I think I was able to help Liang improve his paper.  I gave him my email to send me his draft of the paper so I could read it over and make some notes.

I count myself lucky cause Liang wants to improve as a writer.  He had a great attitude and was listening intently to the discussion.  He sent me his paper today and he applied some of the things we had talked about to his paper.

So my overall feelings about the session was it was successful.  Maybe next time we will have remnants of a paper to work on though.

CATW Assessment of "Hype"

I would grade this paper as a fail.  I don't think the writer fully summarized the article.  In the beginning the writer touches on some of the ideas but they seem to have missed the most important idea.  The writer jumps between different ideas as well; first she is talking about modernizing then she jumps to media and obesity issues, then she concludes with modernizing. For there never being any mention about "modernization" in the article the writer seems to focused on that word, as though it is a key word. 

There is no real personal or outside knowledge incorporated into the piece.  The 2nd paragraph does bring some outside knowledge but I find it's relevance non-essential to the whole essay.  The grammar/word choices seems to be lacking.  They didn't capitalize company names and modernizing and mezmorizing(sic) in the first paragraph seem to repetitive. Missing some commas in key places.  Organization problems are abound in this paper.  The 1st paragraph seems to never want to end.  Structure issues plague the paper as well.

Overall the writer seemed to have missed key points and missed the main idea from the article "Hype".  There is a lot of work to be done to bring this paper to passing level.  However, the writer did take a stance, though on two different ideas, and seemed to know where they wanted to go.

Revisiting Sondra Perl

Having read the piece "Understanding Composing" by Sondra Perl, I've discovered more useful information from her.  In my initial posting I pulled out that the recursive process was the most important contribuition Perl had made to the theory of the writing process.  Looking back now I feel the most important idea to me was her thoughts on "projective structuring". 

I've often found myself writing papers or essays and thinking too much about the audience.  I'm more concerned with shaping it towards the professor than to what I'm actually wanting to say.  Often I've used this method because the topics don't interest me but I'm still trying to produce an "A" worthy paper.  For the most part it has been a successful way to write if you determine success by grades.  However, I've been left with countless papers and essays that I loathe because they don't really represent my own ideas or thoughts.

From the Sondra Perl reading I see that projective structuring shouldn't be the whole process but just a piece of the composing process.  I must keep the audience in mind when writing because I'm not just writing for myself.  However, the paper shouldn't be tailored made for a specific person and that is okay to put more of myself into the work.  I plan to use this idea on any of my preceding papers to see if the quality, to me, is improved.  It would make the whole writing experience, on the college level, more enjoyable if I have work that I could look back on with pride.

So I guess this is a retraction of sorts from my first post.  Personally, Perl's biggest contribution to the world of writing is "projective structuring". 

Tutoring Do's and Don'ts

Tutoring Do's:
1.  To be early is to be on time.
2.  Give the tutee your undivided attention.
3.  Be ready.
4.  Act and look professional
5.  Be attentive to the student and their concerns.
6.  Make eye contact when talking with the student.
7.  Stand tall, stand straight.
8.  Get help if you don't understand something yourself.
9.  Focus on the higher order concerns(HOC).  Thesis, sentence development, and organization.
10.  Get the student to talk about their issues with writing. 


Tutoring Don'ts: 
1.  To be on time is to be late.
2.  Don't be too personal;  what you did over the weekend, who you are dating, your love life.
3.  Dress super casual.
4.  Have the work area covered in distractions; cell phones, food and drinks, anything that isn't student specific for that session.
5.  Arrogance.
6.  Be unfocused on the task at hand.
7.  Be slouched.
8.  Write the student's paper.
9.  Focus all your time on grammar.  The LOC's(lower order concerns) like punctuation and usage.
10.  Get the student talking about their issues with life, you're not a licensed therapist are you?

Thoughts on Tutoring

The last  few weeks I have been in the process of becoming a tutor to a single student for a single session at Laguardia Community College.  I have very mixed feelings about tutoring or more specific about being a tutor.

My reasoning for taking ENG 220 was for the sole purpose of graduating from LGCC at the end of this semester.  I needed a 4 credit class to meet the 60 credit requirement and this was the only class that fit my schedule.  So while it was not forced onto me to take it still feels like it has been forced upon me.  It's because of this reason I didn't have a great swell of enthusiasm for tutoring.

However, I've been to compensate for this feeling at the beginning by convincing myself that what I learn could be useful later in life.  If I don't make it as a filmmaker then I could always teach it film.  As the saying goes, "those that can't do teach".

I have always liked the challenge to doing something that takes me out of my comfort zone and tutoring certainly falls into un-comfort for me.  I've tried to help other people in writing papers before and have had very little success.  My wife, Christy, comes to mind in my most recent failures when she tried to pro-cure my services for a summary paper on psychoanalytics.  Now I've realized it might have been my approach to helping people that have been my down fall.

So now in week three of ENG 220 I feel better about tutoring with the styles and techniques I've learned in the class and can't wait to put them to work.

THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA OF SONDRA PERL

          The process of writing is different for everyone.  We all have developed our method learned from teachers and professors throughout our years of education.  Sondra Perl, an English professor at Lehman College with a Ph.D. from NYU, has spent most of her career in discussion of this development (Ph.D.).  While she has advanced many theories on this procedure the most enduring one would that writing is a “recursive process” (Perl 364). 

            What is the “a recursive process”?  Perl defines it as “that throughout the process of writing, writers return to substrands of the overall process, or subroutines” (Perl 364).  In layman terms you are constantly re-reading and reworking.  Perl breaks this process down into three parts; revision, returning to key words in the topic, and an action she calls the “felt process (Perl 364-65). In order for you to progress forward you must go back throughout the whole module.

            Of the three parts the revision is the most common and familiar to students.  It is drilled into students from the early stages of education that you must constantly revise.   It can be in the form of making corrections as you move from topic to topic all the way to finished project.  For some, the revision process never truly ends, constantly going back and making corrections and adjustments for an eternity. 

            The second part in Perl’s theory on the recursive process is returning to keywords in the topic.  Whatever the topic is about the writer will use a specific word or even theme that they will refer back to throughout the text.  Perl brings out a great point that a writer will go back to the key word whenever they become stuck to get going again (Perl 364).  Going back to the vital points or significant words allow the writer to focus on the main subject matter instead of the paper as a whole.  It allows writers to unburden themselves and clear the mind so they aren’t pre-occupied with different sub-topics.

            The third component in Perl’s idea can be somewhat abstruse.  She describes this point as a “felt sense”(Perl 365).  The term is one she borrowed from Eugene

Gendlin, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, who defined felt sense as “the soft underbelly of thoughts” (Perl 365).  Broken down to simplest terms it means when we write we always go back to what feels right to us.

            The felt sense could be the most problematic of the whole recursive process.  A writer could get himself or herself into a lot of trouble by writing off what feels right to them.  A writer may fight internally about what they feel is the reasoning for choices they make.  Am I making this choice cause it feels right or is it cause of outside forces?  Outside forces could be anything from what your brain tells to thinking this is what the audience really wants to hear. 

            Of the three components that make up Perl’s recursive process, the felt sense is largely incognizance.  A great writer is probably unaware that they are drawing on learned experiences and putting them into words.  That is why it is important that early on a writer has developed basic writings skills that they can rely on instinct

            The recursive process involves steps of going back.  Some of them are literal others are mental.  They all make the writer better at what they do in the end.  Though Sondra Perl has made many contributions to the theory of the process of writing it is this process that stands out as the most important.

WORKS CITED

Perl, Sondra. "Understanding Composing." College Composition and Communication            

            Vol. 31. Ed.4 (1980): 363-69. JSTOR. National Council of Teachers of English.            

            Web.  16 Sept. 2011.

"PhD Program in English: Sondra Perl." The Graduate Center, CUNY. Web.

            18 Sept. 2011.