Shadowing Experience #3

Last night I arrived early to my shadowing appointment, coming right from a not-so-fun root canal appointment that left me loopy, drowsy and numb in the mouth. Fortunately, all I had to do was listen and observe, and talking was not necessary on my part. Several students showed up early right after me, and took a seat outside the Writing Center in the lounge area. I was surprised to see three students (which is the most I had seen yet at one time) coming in for help on a Thursday night.

When Brittany arrived, I began my observations of the tutoring session. The student was writing a paper about Aristotle, which implied to me that she was a freshman, because Aristotle is a subject studied in Core. The student had sent Brittany her paper before the session and had a hard copy printed out, which made the tutorial session easier to conduct because Brittany already had suggestions for the student prepared.

Brittany began by telling the student that she didn’t know what her thesis was in her paper. Since this was a problem for her, Brittany and the student read over the prompt, which asked the student, “How does Aristotle distinguish between a virtuous agent (a person who enjoys helping people) and a continent agent (person who just goes through the actions of life). After hearing what the students prompt was, and knowing her subject, I had a feeling that the underlying problem of the student’s paper was going to be the actual understanding of what she was writing about. My assumption was confirmed shortly after the pair read the prompt and Brittany asked the student to tell her what the thesis was for this paper. The student shyly replied that she is “Not very good at making a thesis…I just kind of write.” The fact that the student didn’t know her thesis was a clear sign to me that she needed help, because in order to write a good paper you must know the overall point that your paper is trying to prove.

Brittany then asked the student to tell her about any specific examples from the text that may answer the prompt’s question. The student replied by saying that she didn’t really remember what she read. Since the student could not answer Brittany’s prompting questions, Brittany took a different approach to helping the student formulate her ideas. She began to read aloud paragraphs from her paper in order to help the student rethink her slightly jumbled ideas, so that they could make her ideas more clear, and thus develop a concrete thesis.

After about fifteen minutes of going through the essay, it was clear that the student’s paper was more of a long summary of what Aristotle said in his book, rather than an analytical, persuasive essay, which would show the student’s actual understanding of the text. In order to help the student understand what she was writing about, Brittany asked thought provoking questions about the statements the student made in her paper, which forced her to think deeper about the meanings behind the concepts in this essay. Although the whole session was mainly dedicated to helping the student understand what she had written, Brittany also made note to help the student with structure and grammar corrections.

In many instances, Brittany found run-on sentences throughout the paper. She also noted that the student’s paper had almost no paragraph breaks. Brittany exclaimed that by shortening her sentences and paragraphs, her ideas would be better understood and more concise. What struck me about the student’s structural mistakes was how closely related they were to her confusion about the content of her essay. I found that these two problems went hand in hand, because the more confused a student is about their paper’s subject, the less likely they are going to be able to exhibit structurally, clear writing. When ideas are only stated instead of understood, it makes it harder for the writer to break down their ideas and give them direction. Because the topics discussed in Core are so confusing, I do not think that these classes are beneficial for incoming freshman. Instead, these classes only confuse and frustrate new students, which is why I think it is appropriate that the school is discarding Core after this year. However, I will be interested to see what course will take the place of Core, and if the writing center will still have to aid many students in this new subject.