Journal 4

Personal Reflection

Summary: I touched bases with the ENGL 121 student I met last Friday to gauge how well the reading strategies we went over helped her on her exam. While she was disappointed in her score, she felt that the process I gave her worked very well, and she considered her late entrance into the course the cause of her poor performance more than her struggles with comprehending the reading. She seemed to walk away with a solid understanding of how to build a basic essay, and next week we'll reconvene to go over what worked and what didn't. With my new ENGL 121 student, we spent part of the time reviewing basic technology literacy just to open up her assignments, but we spent the rest of the time drafting the final portion of her essay and then revising what she already had. This week's appointment was spent trying to work through the WPJ questions together, though we only got about halfway through before our time ran out.

Challenges: While my ENGL 121 student on Fridays had a very strong basis in reading and writing already, my new Tuesdays ENGL 121 student struggled a little more in understanding the assignment guidelines, how to answer and structure her paragraphs, and understanding my own feedback. I'll need to make a note to take it slower next time and start from a more thorough assessment of where she's at before moving on. With my appointment, we both struggled with understanding each other. I would try to offer him examples of what I might fill in for the WPJ assignment and to help him understand what the question was asking for, but he would write down exactly what I said instead of taking only the examples that were applicable to his situation. He seemed to lack basic spelling, grammar, and sentence-building skills, and sometimes struggled to understand the assignment's directions and my own suggestions. I tried to focus on higher level concerns exclusively and did not touch on his grammar or spelling mistakes, but I think he struggled with those lower level issues to the extent that it interfered with his understanding of his higher level issues as well. I need to learn more about how to handle students who come in lacking these skills, especially with the onset of AI and ChatGPT pushing some of these students beyond the help they should have already received, to better identify which areas I need to focus on. It was difficult to tackle many of these problems in an hour time-block, so I also need to search out other programs that might assist students with building on these basic issues on a long term scale.

Ideas or theories: I was surprised by the varying level of my students this week. My Friday ENGL 121 student is mostly capable of completing their assignments, and only needs my hep to clarify complicated instructions, reinforce their preexisting knowledge, and point out specific areas of weakness. My Tuesday ENGL 121 student was able to generate the content of her essay with some prompting, needed some more help structurally, and was still lacking some general skills like technology literacy. My appointment was writing and reading at a very basic level, needed my help to break down the prompt and its guidelines, to spell words for him when autocorrect could not identify what he was trying to write, to help generate ideas for content while providing him examples of what might fit in different areas and suggesting how he could adapt those general ideas to his specific purposes, and to organize his different words together to help form cohesive sentences referencing the same topic. Before this, I had mostly helped students who I was familiar with and who needed small amounts of help or more involved feedback and assistance at every step of the process, but had still learned to write at a high school level. I realized that I need to come into this internship with no expectations from the students, and I need to change my assessment and evaluation process as I meet every student. Despite tutoring for college level courses, I cannot expect the students to have high school level reading and writing. With their diverse backgrounds, some might need more extensive help than I am used to offering, and I need to readjust my methods for those students.