[Bkn-english-646-fall-2009] Assignment 5.

[tony iantosca]

The educational system does indeed need revamping. I'm not sure about your assertion that teachers should not employ methods with their students that they do not use themselves. Clearly, every writer's process differs vastly, and we need to take that into account as tutors, using that information to adapt ourselves to myriad learning/writing styles. As advanced writers, it's probably unlikely that our writing strategies will resemble those of our students. 
 


From: Grausso at aol.com
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:38:39 -0400
To: bkn-english-646-fall-2009 at lists-1.liu.edu
Subject: [Bkn-english-646-fall-2009] Assignment 5.


Here's the fifth assignment. I apologize for the "rant" style-- honestly, I come off as being way more opinionated than I actually am about the material. It's mostly because I do my writing in the middle of the night, and I think I need to take a stance in order to remain engaged.. or something... 
 
John: To answer your question about tutoring sessions focused entirely on the subject of introductions, I had a walk-in session like that today. The student arrived without his assignment sheet, and spent about five minutes trying to explain the topic to me. He actually approached his paper as though it was a free-writing exercise, so I tried to get him to recognize that he had to do two things in his introduction: 1) State the necessary background information about the topic & 2) Develop a definitive argument. He struggled to write clear sentences, even though he was able to generate specific ideas in his dialogue with me. Ultimately, I had him write down exactly what he was saying in response to my questions, and he was like "Oh, yeah, that's much clearer." There was an unbelievable level of disorganization in his overall paper, and I gave him some techniques that he could use in order to re-shape it. It was a pretty difficult tutoring session, because there were so many other problems in the paper that needed to be addressed-- he didn't understand MLA formatting, and there were other grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. It was frustrating knowing that he would leave the session without getting more accomplished. All I could do was encourage him to try to come back to the Writing Center in the future. 
 
Rice: I think it's interesting that you use different methods depending on the students you're dealing with-- I wish there was some way of assessing the learning-types (kinetic, visual, auditory) of our students before we meet with them. I feel like some students require much more attention than others, and I find it hard to predict whether a method will benefit a specific student until we've tried it. 
 
See you all on Wednesday. 
 
Christine  		 	   		  
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