My First Tutoring Session: Into the Fire

When we entered the English 99 class for the first time, I felt so overwhelmed and nervous. Many thoughts ran through my head but the main one that kept playing over and over was if I would be good enough. As soon as I sat down with the first student, my nervousness subsided as we introduced ourselves and I told him why I was in his class. Soon after the introduction, we began to discuss the assignment which was a blog about an essay written by Timothy Sexton. The essay was about reality television and the dangers that it may cause. After reading the first student's blog, I was relieved because he had a great understanding of the essay and formulated good ideas. He had some structural issues that needed to be corrected to make his piece better. We worked together to find the main ideas that he wanted to discuss based on what he had already written. I had him write down the top three ideas that he wanted to discuss then we printed the blog and I told him to go through his work and underline and highlight the sentences that go with each main idea. Just when I thought I was in a good position to relax, I was summoned to assist two additional students. I got nervous all over again. I had to use my time- management skills to give both students equal time as well as the correct advice to assist them in correcting their blogs on The Matrix. When working with these students, they both had similar issues in their writing. They had difficulty writing a concise summary that gave the reader a full understanding of the piece. In both instances, the student only had three vague sentences. To assist the students in writing more comprehensive summaries, I asked them to re-read the prompt and identify three main ideas from the piece. After both students completed that task, I instructed them to paraphrase the main idea of each topic into a complete sentence. This exercise helped the student develop a clear summary of the work.