First Tutoring Experiance

                Kunga and I began our tutoring session with me introducing myself. After which he introduced himself. I began with asking if he was nervous, which he was, and I told him that it was ok and he should take a deep breath and relax. After he had calmed down a bit, I told him I would like to read through his essay aloud and if I could use a pencil to mark up the areas we need to fix. He was fine with me doing this.

            I read his essay aloud and found that it was well written, and could only find grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. But I could also see that the essay he had written would easily pass the CATW. All of his ideas were comprehendible. I quickly went through the checklist (mentally) of what the CATW requires to give a passing grade. He had introduced the article’s name and author’s name right in the beginning. He summarized the most important ideas of the author. He developed the idea and explained its significance. He included a personal experience. And finally he gave a brief conclusion to his essay.

            After reading through his essay, I told him it was well written and organized. I told him we needed to focus on some of his grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. After which I asked him to read out loud his essay in front of me, and when he did he seemed to recognize some of his own mistakes. Out of his entire essay about two or three sentences were confusing (they were not getting his message across appropriately), which he realized when he read them out loud. I asked him what he was trying to say in those sentences, and had him write it down. He did not recognize the spelling errors and I told him the spellings for those words.

At one point in the essay he had used the word “loading board”, which in his country means “billboards”. And at first I could not understand what a loading board was, and I asked him to explain a little, which he did. I then understood that he was talking about a billboard, and I explained to him that in the United States we call the big board’s with advertisements on them, billboards.

He was also switching back and forth from past to present tense, and I explained to him that when an essay it is best to stick to one tense throughout the entire essay, preferable present. And he choose to keep the tense present. We had about fifteen minutes left in the session being over and we began conversing about if he knew when the exam was? And he did not. He also told me he was not concerned if he passed or failed because he had other exams to worry about. He eventually asked me if I thought his essay would pass the CATW, and I said I believed it would pass.

After looking back at the session, I would have made him start writing his paper on a new page, so that it could be submitted to his teacher with the corrections he made.