Journal 12
Journal 12
I had several cancellations this week, likely due to the oncoming break for Thanksgiving as well as the mounting pressure as the semester winds down, and both of the sessions I did have lasted half an hour each. Ultimately, I spent this downtime engaging in training I had wanted to accomplish but had been unable to for the duration of this semester: I observed the practices of other tutors in the URWC. I was able to observe a variety of tutors tutoring through Zoom and in-person, providing me key insights into their process. Mainly, I just listened to their conversations while multitasking on my own work, but through their interactions, I could deduce some of their priorities and which methods they chose to use.
Summary: My two sessions gave me practice in two divergent assignments, topics, and methods of assistance. For the first, I helped the student brainstorm for an open-ended response paper where the student was writing about their own experiences of intersectionality: they were looking at how their disability, their status as a minority, and their gender identity affected one another. For the second, I helped with revising an essay responding to how gender functions as a social construct as opposed to sex which functions with roots in biological functions based off of the course material. They were similar, but the former's guidelines were much looser. In that case, my own response became less rigid as I focused on generating worthwhile ideas to expand on later. For the latter, the guidelines were clearly laid out, so my advice was centered around adhering to the guidelines.
Challenges: It continues to be difficult to form a connection through Zoom appointments. Beyond that, identifying where issues with the assignments guidelines arise is still proving problematic, though I am making progress in walking my guidance backwards to the root of those issues. While brainstorming for an assignment, especially for a student who is knowledgeable and experienced in the assignment's prompt, is generally easier than fine-tuning an end product, revisions become much more challenging when a student has written something they do not entirely understand. In several instances, while the student has produced work that mostly conforms to the guidelines, they often struggle to fully understand the assignment. Then, revisions become less about the written work and more about returning to the assignment once again. Guiding reading comprehension is often a more challenging task than guiding writing ability, partially because of my lack of experience, but also partially because it can be difficult to engage the students in genuine attempts to understand their assignments.
Ideas or theories: Throughout this semester, I have begun to identify one major area that I need further training in: reading comprehension. While I have had to explicitly learn many functions of writing, I have never had to do the same with reading. Today, this means I am more comfortable providing feedback on writing than on reading as the latter is also more instinctive. Reading comprehension forms the basis of anyone's writing ability, and without a high level of reading comprehension, many students struggle to even begin properly tackling a complex assignment.
While I still have not yet had the opportunity to engage in several of the outside goals I arranged, such as formulating a website for the URWC, I have met or made progress on several of the goals I made for the URWC itself that I established closer to the beginning of the semester. I have learned APA format with attention paid to citations and general formatting concerns, and I have also achieved my goal of making at least three students laugh over a Zoom tutoring session. While these goals are small, they each represent my larger path as a tutor growing slowly with each new session. I still have yet to thoroughly learn Chicago style, however, as none of my students have come in with assignments matching that particular style, though I have learned some of it in broad strokes. I plan to pay more attention to that whenever I have a lull at the URWC. I have now also pinpointed a key goal for future tutoring endeavors: build upon my explicit reading comprehension skills and abilities to teach reading comprehension. This final goal will likely have the biggest improvement on my overall ability at this point.