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<DIV>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...
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>See you all on Wednesday. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Christine </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>