Therapy Tutor Session

Therapy Tutor

Jenny walks into the writing center, looking upset and tired. 

Jenny:  Hi, can I see a tutor that might be able to help me with my final paper. 

Secretary:  Sure, just fill this out (hands Jenny a piece of paper) and take a seat and someone will be right with you. 

Jenny:  Okay, thank you.

Secretary:  Not a problem. 

While waiting in the chair Jenny fidgets around and can’t seem to sit still.  She can’t stop thinking about her grade depending on this paper, and how much she is struggling with it.  She zones out replaying the events that have occurred the last few days in her head and she begins to feel herself get upset.  Her tutor comes out of the back room……

Tutor:  Hello, you can come with me I’ll be tutoring you today.  Let’s go find a table somewhere and get to work. 

Jenny:  Okay sounds good to me.

Tutor:  This looks good right here.  Take a seat and let’s get to work.  How are you?

Jenny and the tutor take seat.

Jenny:  I’m good thank you, extremely stressed and this paper is adding to the stress.  I’m just having a really hard time getting my thoughts together and an even harder time getting them down on paper. 

Tutor:  Okay, well my name is Janelle and let me see what I can do to help you regarding this paper.  Do you have the prompt from your professor? 

Jenny:  Yes here it is.

Janelle:  Give me a sec, let me read over the prompt and read your paper.  Then we can see what we can do here. 

Jenny:  Fine, it’s really not that great of a paper seeing how I was up with my daughter all night with my daughter the last few days because she’s been sick.  And I just have a lot going on in my life right now.

Janelle:  No worries, I’m sure we’ll be able to figure something out together.  Sometimes it helps to have someone collaborate with you. 

Jenny sits in the chair looking very nervous and anxious.  As the tutor reads her paper, she looks on read it as well.  She is so embarrassed by her work. 

Janelle:  Okay so there some really great things going on in this paper.  Your thesis statement is excellent and so are some of your supporting ideas.  We have to work on maybe coming up with some better supporting ideas and also expanding the ones you already have down. 

Jenny:  Yeah I sort of rushed this paper.  I am definitely much more capable of producing better than this, but recently there have been a lot of things going on in my personal life, that I haven’t been able to concentrate. 

Janelle:  That is totally understandable.  Unfortunately our personal lives can’t be put on hold in order for us to concentrate on other things.  But let’s take this time right now, and see what we can come up with together. 

Jenny:  Yeah but you don’t understand, how difficult my life is right now.  I have a sick child at home, I just lost my job, and I’m barely able to make ends meet.  I just don’t think I can do this right now. 

Janelle:  Sure you can.  We are going to do this together     

Live tutoring session #3

Entering the tutoring session this week was much easier.  I was glad to see that the students had done a practice CATW.  The prompt talked about how the advertisements of fast food and junk food have influenced the youth and affected them negatively.  It also spoke about  After reading the prompt and reviewing the first tutee's practice exam, I was highly impressed with his work.  He had definitely take into account some of the things we had worked on.  He had originally struggled with the introduction and summary and this time around it was really well done.  However he only had two body paragraphs.  I explained to him how his first body paragraph could definitely be split into two paragraphs, seeing how there was so much information in it to begin with.  In this paragraph he spoke about how McDonald's advertised their Happy Meals to children because it included a toy in it.  He spoke about how children begged their parents to go there because they wanted the toys.     Once we split the paragraph into two, he realized how much better the paper flowed.  From there we sat and talked about maybe adding a few more details here and there.  We used just talk about it to expanded his ideas and add more details.  We talked over the ideas he already had and began to develop more.  He actually told me he had so many other ideas but because of time he was unable to include and develop them.  This bought music to my ears because he had always struggled with coming up with ideas.  Since day one he had asked me for ways to come up with ideas in such a short amount of time.  I was extremely happy to see that he had found confidence in his writing this time around.  At the end of the tutoring session we were asked by their professor to get them feedback on two things that we thought the might want to work on.  For him I told him to work on overcome writer's block.  I explained that all he need was the right amount of confidence to start off because once he started writing he wrote well.  And I also told him to work on sentence structure.  Often times his writing, although not hard to understand, lacks sentence structure. 
The second student that I was asked to work with (because my usual second student was running late) was not at all open for help.  He refused a few times with me and with his professor at all.  I even asked him why it was that he did not want to get any help from me, if he was shy or embarrassed

During the second live tutoring session, I found myself being less nervous than the first one.  I was still nervous though.  I found a little comfort in knowing that we would be working with the same students we did the first time around.  They looked happy and excited to see that I was working with them again.  They had both worked on the same papers we had previously went over.  I read over the first students paper to see what kind of changes he had made.  I realized right away what he had fixed.  He had definitely expanded on things that we spoke about.  I read over his work again and we agreed that he needed to work on his conclusion a bit more.  While he worked on that I went over the second tutee's paper with him.  This student had also worked on his paper from the last time I had worked with him.  He had a problem with his conclusion and had written a few different options down and wanted my opinion.