My First tutoring Session

I can’t find the words to say how nervous I had felt before I had begun the tutoring session. Everything that I could possibly think of became difficult to understand. As if everything I had learned erase cleaned from my mind. I wanted my tutee to learn something from me. I wanted to guide my tutee in the right direction. I was so nervous that I started to re-read the "Tutoring and Writing" handbook all over again. I thought this would help me refresh my memory. My classmate could see my eyes beginning to close as I passed through the state of almost fainting. The pressure became too high, the coldest room became the hottest room in the matter of minutes, and my temper started to increase. My classmate was telling me to stay calm and I just kept breathing very harshly to the extreme measures. As the Professor walked into the classroom, I knew it was time to break all the nerves out of sight. I did not want her to see how terribly pail I looked or think that I was not ready to do this. I was ready to begin the tutoring session. Everything was happening so quickly and I was just trying to adjust to the new setting within my own head.

The next thing I knew, I was assigned to my tutee. His name is Henry and judging by his image and profile, he looked as if he did not want to be here working with me. I did as I always do when I see a trouble student. I smile a lot and talk about my accomplishments so that he knows exactly what I am capable of. I quickly came back to my senses and ask him what have you been working on? He pulled out a CATW paper essay on “Bundle of Trouble”. I than asked if he had a written draft on this particular piece of essay and he had told me that he was absent for the day they wrote about it. Automatically my first thought came to mind and it was “When a Writer needs help finding a Topic” from the book. We quickly conversed about the reading I was unable to get much out of him so I tried another method. I had him free write for ten minutes about whatever comes to mind about the reading. As he was writing, I was re-reading the CATW essay again to myself. I am the kind of person that needs to re-read more than once. It helps me make better judgment on what I could do next for him. Ten minutes have gone by and he was still writing his thoughts down. I did not want to stop him because I felt that he was learning from this. I couldn’t help to smile in the moment because I was so happy to see that he was doing so much better in expressing his ideas. I could see his mood change as he was writing. He was in his moment and I gave him another ten more minutes to finish his thoughts. After those minutes have passed, I quickly reviewed his writing. I could tell that he had an understanding of the piece although I had found another issue in his writing.

This issue may possibly be another reason on why he may have failed the entrance exam. His sentence structure is completely unheard of from at least in my perspective. He loses the true meaning within his one sentence. I could see the same issue being done repeatedly throughout his entire paper. He does not use any conjunctions (and, but, so, etc.) or articles (The or As) to support a subject and verb in the sentence. If anything, he needs to take an entire course on linguistics because this will help improve his essay writing. The next time I see him on Tuesday, I will bring my dictionary and linguistics book so he knows exactly how to write a better sentence.

Now that I have a better idea on how he writes, I than moved back on to the CATW essay. We read the paper once together and then we went back to re-read the essay again. I told him that we are going to make some side notes on each paragraph we have read this time. We read one paragraph and he took notes, than we read another paragraph than took more notes, and so on and so forth. I told him to gather all the note so that he could tell me in his own words what the author is trying to say. He did outstanding when he gathered all the information together into a summery. Since we ran out of time, I left him with a little homework assignment. I told him the next time I see him on Tuesday, I would like a summery on the author’s perspective so that way we could compare it to the previous writing u made for twenty minutes. He was very pleased with the session and I asked him if he learned anything and his response was a yes.

After the tutoring session, I’ve learned within myself that there is much needed work to be done. I want to better improve my verbal skills because it was very hard not to stutter. I stutter when I am nervous and I hope to overcome those fears one day. Although I felt the tutoring session went very well and I am going to be looking forward in the next one. I have a better plan now that I understand where the tutee is coming from. Hopefully my tutee Henry would be thinking the same way as well. My best recommendation to all tutors who are nervous is to never hold back on what you’re truly capable of. If we hold back, there will be a lot of lost information that could have been said sooner rather than later. Overcome the fear and shine to your fullest.