Today I was able to complete my fourth and final observation!!! because I had such a wonderful experience the other day I was hoping to be paired with the tutor I had before but he wasn't there :-(.
I was paired with a gentlemen who did not look as though he was having the best morning. He was assigned two students who needed help with their papers. First, I would like to mention that the tutor and the two students were all Spanish speaking natives so I assumed that the session would go pretty good. Now, the first student came in with a paper from her class already written but just wanted some type of feedback because of her difficulty with speaking English she wanted to make sure she worded everything correctly. The tutor mostly focused on high order concerns when reading her paper. He wanted to make sure that the students paper answered all of the questions asked by her professor in which it did. He seemed rather impressed and pleased with how well her paper was written. The student struggled a bit with quoting so he briefly explained to her how to quote and cite the article she was quoting from. When it came time to help the second student he was very annoyed at how poorly her paper was written. For the lack of better words her paper reflected exactly how she spoke, which in my opinion was not proper English. This could have been because of the difference in language since her primary language is Spanish. I felt like the tutor was very rude to this young girl at one point he said to her "this doesn't make sense" which I felt was a bit harsh. I think that he could have been a bit more understanding to her needs. I believe that instead of attacking someone or making them feel bad about themselves explain to them what they are doing wrong because they could really not know how to write a paper and the only way to learn to have a patient person to teach them that's the whole concept of learning. This students paper was about a transfer statement and she had a lot of grammar issues and the tutor spent a majority of the time with helping her correct all grammatical errors on her paper. While he went back and forth with helping the students there was often an awkward silence when one student was not being helped. At one point on of the girls started combing her hair and applying lipstick during the session. If I were the tutor I would have told the student "Look over your paper and let me know if you see anything wrong or take this time to expand your paper while I help my other student". After he was done with helping the students he sent them on their way, got up from his seat and went into the tutors lounge. He did not ask me if I had any questions or concerns about why he did certain things. He just walked away.
Nice incorporation of dialogue and details.
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