https://www.mystorybook.com/books/103171

My goal with my project was to create short story which describe the most effective ways to be an effective tutor. I wanted to make it short and sweet and get my message across. I also wanted to use the some of the reading from the course to support my experience. It was very challenging deciding what to do for this project. Before I began my assignment I made myself mock an assignment with guide lines and continue from there.

My assignment didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to turn out. I was aiming for a small and brief story like which summed up what and effective tutor looks like. I feel that it was too long and it read like and essay something which I was attempting to stay away from. The way which I would modify it in the future would be to turn it into a website and condense the amount of writing. In the website I would add videos, pictures and maybe additional resources.

“Writing centers do not and should not repeat the classroom experience and are not there to compensate for poor teaching, over- crowded classrooms, or lack of time for overburdened instructors to confer adequately with their students. Instead, writing centers provide another, very crucial aspect of what writers need-tutorial interaction (Harris, 27).”

1. Why is important that writing centers do not repeat classroom experiences?
2. What is the type of environment that a writing center should create and why?

“Tutors are thus other than teachers in that they inhabit a middle ground where their role is that of translator or interpreter, turning teacher language into student language (Harris, 37).”

1. Tutors are expected to be the middle ground but how can tutors support students who are coming with very diverse subjects in a place like the ESL center?
2. Can a tutor help the writer in a subject like anthropology or business presentation if the tutor has no back ground knowledge in the subject? Why or why not?
3. What should the tutor do in that situation?

 

“Students readily view a tutor as someone to help them surmount the hurdles others have set up for them, and as a result students respond differently to tutors than to teachers, a phenomenon readily noticed by tutors who end a stint of writing center tutoring and then go off to teach their own classes(Harris, 28).”

1. Do you agree or disagree with this passage and why?
2. Why might a student see a teacher as superior than them but see a tutor as an equal or someone who is willing to help them?
3. Why can tutors question lead students to understanding, while the teachers question might lead to more question and anxiety?

 

“No one doubts that student writers too often lack confidence in their skills or that they find writing to be an anxiety-producing task, but the classroom teacher cannot attend to the variety of worries that inhibit some student writers (Harris, 35).”

1. What role does confidence play when tutoring?
2. And how can a tutor help a student develop self-confidence in their writing?
3. Or does the tutor even play a role in increasing or decreasing the writer’s self confidence in their writing?

Hello Everyone,

My name is Elizabeth Flores, I am an English Education major. Since I was a very young girl I’ve known that I wanted to be a teacher. I learned English as a second language who migrated a lot because of this I struggled to learn English. It wasn’t community college that I began to acquired English and still to this day I continue to work on becoming proficient in English. I’ve been working as a tutor for the California Mini-Corps program for the past four years. I’ve had the opportunity to work with students from K-12, I work in the class room alongside the teacher and provide supplemental support for students, especially for those who are English learners. For the past two summers I have had the opportunity to be an outdoor camp instructor and teach science and math to 4^th to 9^th grade students who are English learners. I also have had the opportunity to shadow the vice principal position and work with college students. Because of this opportunity is that I was interested in this class to experience working in the classroom or tutoring college students. My career aspiration is to become a Middle school teacher (ideally 6^th grade), and teach English Language Development (ELD) classes as well as English Language Arts (ELA).

“Insofar as “understanding” is something a person does in his or her head, it ultimately involves the mental representations of individuals. Understanding is seen to rise out the mental operations of a subject on objective structures. Lave and Wenger reject this view of understanding insofar as they locate learning not in the acquisition of structure, but in the increased access of learning to participating roles in expert performances (Hanks, 17).”

The questions which this passage raises are; is understanding the same idea, concept, or notion as learning? Does understanding begin as a mental process and then become something individuals can apply? Is understanding something we do individually or something that we do as a group? What is the difference between understanding and learning? Lave and Wenger theory is that learning is something that happens when a person has the access to participate in a role. Were people learn by doing rather than by reading a book or a manual which list the steps of how to do something. It is not until you physically do the action of the manual book that you learn and understand what the book is saying. But then this raises the question of how children understand abstract concepts they never seen or done and are capable of producing an end product. To me understanding is when I am capable of questioning what is going on, what I read, or what I am being told. When I am able to picture what is it that I need to do or what others need to do. While learning is being able to process a new concept, ideas anything that might be new to me. Once I have learned something then I can understand it by applying it on something. Just because I don’t apply what I earned doesn’t mean I don’t understand it or does it? What I think Lave and Wenger are arguing is that people learn more through experiences rather than studying a book. Before you become a teacher you need to learn teaching strategies and become proficient in what you want to teach. But it’s not until you are in the classroom that you learn and understand what it is to be a teacher.