My co-tutoring session occurred the week before the end of the semester, at Late Nite Writes. All of the tutors were very busy: there was no shortage of tutees that wanted assistance with their writing. My tutee, an Equine Studies major, arrived at ten o’clock, and we discussed her paper for over an hour.
I’m an English major with biology and psychology minors, while this tutee is an Equine Studies major. These are vastly different majors, but we were able to meet in the middle to collaborate on her research paper. We both used our knowledge to help her develop her writing skills. She had trouble understanding one of the studies that she wrote about in her paper, and I was able to help her interpret the source because of my experiences with the reading articles during my science classes.
I was nervous starting the session, but I felt more comfortable and confident after ten minutes. During the session I tried to help her develop the “big picture” of her paper without taking control of it. In order to accomplish this, I think that I used both directive and non-directive strategies in order to help this tutee.
While tutoring, I found a connection between this session and the presentation that I created for class on global coherence. We focused on high-order concerns and the flow of the entire paper. We did also work on low-order concerns such as grammar when it was necessary to the understanding and clarity of the paper.
I love learning, and tutoring supports learning for everyone involved. In Writing Tutor Training, we discussed how tutoring helps us transfer our knowledge to the tutees, and how their writing teaches us new things because of the diversity of their majors and other subjects of interest. I found this true during our session. My tutee’s writing introduced me to information and statistics regarding the use of Equine-Assisted Therapy, and its effectiveness with aiding in the treatment of clients with cerebral palsy.
This session made me feel very helpful and made me more comfortable with tutoring. Though I was nervous at first, this experience made me more excited to tutor in the future.
