Tutoring Experience: What I Learned Through It

 

I don't know about anyone else in the class, but I walked into my tutoring session with a wrong perspective. I met her in the fishbowl with the thought that I had some things to teach this girl. As a freshman, she could gain a lot from me reading over her paper and giving her feedback. I had an arrogance about my skills and thought that she needed my help. How wrong I was.

 

Kylea came into our session with an essay that made me rethink my skills... in a good way. She was a great listener and tried to grasp the few things that I noticed could use some help, but her paper completely exceeded my expectations. After reading other past examples of WIFYS students' papers in class, I had a negative opinion of what I would see in hers. Thankfully, though, she brought her paper to life and conveyed her point extremely well.

 

I asked Kylea what they were to write about, and she said a place that was either important to them or had a special meaning. She chose to write about her grandma's house and all of the family gatherings, whether for holidays or for Sunday meals, that took place there. The amount of description she had in her essay was AMAZING!! She truly made me feel like I was part of the family by being able to relive those moments with her. The color words she used to describe how her grandmother's house looked and the brilliant sun that shone across the grass and pine trees in her backyard put the reader in the home. She went on to lay out the extravagant meals her family had (mainly several different kinds of Spanish food and desserts that I won't even try to spell for the fact that I know I will butcher them). She recalled how she was taught to cook a certain dish that is now her responsibility to make for the family and how she would spend the night with her grandmother. She had a great conclusion where she revealed to the reader the safety and security she feels in her grandmother's home and how special it will always be to her.

 

Now, just from my sporadic recall of her essay, I think you can get the idea of how great the content of her essay was. While she did a great job telling the story, she had a few mechanical errors in her essay that are pretty common. Comma usage was a big pattern that I noticed throughout her work. Thinking back on how much I struggled with commas and learning where to put them gave me the ability to relate to Kylea and reassure her that it is a common mistake for writers. She specifically excluded them in a few main areas: 1. after introductory phrases 2. before and after modifiers 3. before her conjunctions. After marking where they should go and explaining why they go there (because you pause when speaking there, because the modifier adds details that are necessary, because you have joined 2 sentences together), I believe that she understood and could make the changes in the future on her own. In her introduction paragraph, she had some repetitious syntax, mainly starting sentences with "It's" or "The" rather than changing them up for some variety. I was VERY pleased when she asked how she could change them to sound better (it reassured me that she was paying attention and genuinely cared about what I had to say). I was able to walk her through one example where she could take out some extra words and combine sentences to get rid of the repetition (it was a very fulfilling teacher moment!). Other than a few spelling errors and other minor mistakes, these were the main patterns I saw in Kylea's essay.

 

I was so happy to be able to work with her because I felt like she taught me more than what I was able to teach her. She brought to light several of the aspects of grading essays that we've been discussing in class (pointing out the good things you see, finding error patterns, great content with poor mechanics), so she enabled me to address these situations in real life circumstances. She far exceeded my expectations, and I am excited to see how she may grow from this experience like I have.

 



My Thoughts on Autumn

 

When I think of Autumn, I think of leaves. The changing color to their fall to the ground to their crunch under our feet. Leaves symbolize autumn and all the changes that go with it. The heat of summer starts to fade, and the coolness of October is ushered in. The big, green trees of August turn into the read and yellow trees of September. The shorts and t-shirts we wear are gone, and the jeans and comfy sweatshirts appear, setting the stage for the best season to appear. While the beginning of fall is a happy, cheerful time, the end of fall is gloomy. The coolness we longed for is gone and the harsh winds and low temperatures of December come. Pumpkins are rotting, trees are bare, the grass is brown, and the sky is gray. We bundle up in layers to shut out the cold as we battle the dryness that takes over our hands. When we long for the beauty of fall, we tend to forget about the misery that follows soon after, choosing to rather focus on the here and now that we love so much.

 



Teaching Strategies

 

In our book, "Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing," Constance Weaver presents the English/ Language Arts classroom in a new light that introduces teaching strategies and ways of thinking that haven't been done much before. Let's explore them, shall we?

 

1. Teach grammar in the context of writing.

Teachers often teach grammar as its own thing, which we can understand when we realize that we tend to teach the way we were taught. Because of this, isolated grammar has become tradition in the classroom, but research shows that students grasp and can apply what they learn when it is paired with writing.

 

2. Teach students to edit their works for "appropriate words and grammar" (5)

When we teach students to edit their own work for "appropriate words and grammar," we help them understand the importance of what they say and how they say it. They begin to better grasp their abilities as writers when we let them do their own editing, rather than it all falling on the teacher's shoulders.

 

3. Encouraging students to widen the audience of their work past the teacher.

By increasing the number of readers, the writer begins to take a deeper interest in their work and the message they convey through it. This can be achieved by having writing contests within the schools, having the students enter statewide or national writing contests, and getting their work published in a local newspaper.

 

4. Focus students on the function of words rather than analyze sentences.

Most students don't think about nouns, verbs, or modifiers when they are writing, they just write. Even now, I don't have to think about what noun or verb form I am using, it comes naturally. So rather than wasting precious classroom instruction time on labeling parts of speech, teachers must show students how words are used to convey different meanings, no matter what form they are in.

 

5. Application over Memorization

Students tend to have a negative attitude towards English class, in general, but especially towards grammar. Sadly, our students have been taught that memorization is key in learning instead of the application of what they are learning. When we show them how to apply these lessons to their lives, they learn and understand so much more easily.

 

6. Rules are pointless in real life.

Ever heard of the phrase that "rules are meant to be broken?" Well, I think that definitely applies in the writing part of English class. When we drill rules into our students' heads, they tend to shrink away from writing for the fear of making a mistake. However, if we should them models of other writers and how they write, it's an encouragement that writing should be free.

 

7. Is the red pen helpful or harmful?

As future teachers, we need to pause and reflect on our own experiences with the red pen. While I  like the idea of it because it gives me something to work on, I have to remember that most students see it as scary or daunting, and they don't want to deal with their papers when a teacher hands it back slashed to pieces. We need to give advice, point out what they did well, and give them a few aspects at a time for them to work on.

 

8. Writing is recursive.

Teachers MUST understand that writing isn't "once and done." While this may be the way it used to be taught, we know now that this is a very ineffective strategy. We must show our students the process of creating a piece of writing (prewriting, drafts, editing, revising, final copy). All good writers move freely from step to step and back again; it's a recursive process.

 

9. Reading and writing must work together.

If we want our students to succeed in writing, we have to have them succeed in reading. The two go hand-in-hand, and all great writers have to be good readers. By spending time with their noses in books, students will see model after model of how to write, and write well, along with opening their minds to a wider vocabulary.

 

10. The Writing Workshop

Throughout my time in high school, I saw the effects of writing workshops on my level of work. If a teacher wanted us to write an essay and turn it in a week later, with no other interaction, I sought after approval of what the teacher wanted, rather than expanding my skills. However, when they incorporated workshops, my skills improved because I knew that other peers would be reading and critiquing my work (and who doesn't want to seem smart to all their classmates?).

 

 



Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way"

As a class, we just finished reading "The Mother Tongue." I know that along the way and through our presentations, we've discussed with each other what we liked and didn't like about the book. However, I feel like laying out a few aspects of the book that really got me thinking is a good way to interact with the text itself, but also, it allows me to think aloud about some things we didn't discuss in class.

So, here goes nothing...

1. "Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more students of English in China than there are people in the United States" (Bryson 4).
I feel that this quote is a nice introduction to the book, and it sets the groundwork for a lot of the different aspects that Bryson investigates in the English language. This quote caught my attention and immediately made me think about all that we, as Americans, take for granted. Until reading this book, I never stopped to really think about our language, its uniqueness, or its high demand globally. I never considered that people are seeking after knowing the language because it was just handed to me. I feel that we take our language for granted most times, and this quote really opened my eyes to that fact.

2. "Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages..." (Bryson 81).
This quote JUMPED off the page at me the first time I read it. Again, this book has opened my eyes to so much about our language that I've never thought about, and for that, I am appreciative! This quote summarizes why teachers/professors always stress the importance of context (both in the book and the historical time period when it was written). Reading a poem today that was written by Shakespeare hundreds of years ago, we could possibly interpret it a completely different way from how he meant it just because we attribute meanings to a word that weren't there long ago. It is very important to read, reread, and research when unpacking a piece of literature.

3. "What is certain is that the number of words we use is very much smaller than the number of words we know" (Bryson 164).
Are we just creatures of habit sticking to what we like best, or are some words so specific that a time to use them rarely appears? This is the question that popped into my mind when reading this passage. When you really stop to think about it, we do tend to use the same words over and over again just in a different order (unless you're writing an essay, then I think we all right-click and use the synonyms option to make ourselves sound smarter...at least I do...). In response to the question, I think it's a mixture of both. We are simplistic people, but there are words that hardly ever need to be used. Good job, Bill, you got us thinking.

History is Present

Throughout his novel, Bryson presents the history of the English language. But if you look close enough and stop to really think about it, I think that the history he talks about is very much present today. Just like how Shakespeare created 10% of the words he used in his own literary works, people all around the world are making up words for new situations. Two examples of this are in slang and technology. Slang incorporates any of the words from "swag" to "lit" to "bruh." These are most prominent among the younger generations in society, and they can often give us a bad name. Technology and its advancements have also increased the number of words we use today that weren't used in previous centuries. The pilgrims on the mayflower didn't have any need for an "iPhone" or "Microsoft." Native Americans weren't concerned with updating their "software" on their "computer." Pioneers weren't rushing home to "binge watch Netflix" or check how many "likes" their "Instagram post" received. These are just some basic words that most people know and use on a daily basis that weren't even thought of 100 years ago. So while our vocabulary is changing, our patterns of advancement aren't.

Future...To Be or Not To Be

The future of English is in question, here, and to be honest, I don't know what that looks like. I mean we're soon going to have cars driving themselves and we already have drones dropping packages on your doorstep, so whose to say if we are even still talking in 20 years. Now this is being a little dramatic, but who can honestly know. I think it's scary to think about. Will the rules of grammar and sentence structure still be in place when we have kids, or are things going to change so much that we won't even be certified to teach? I feel like English, like our country, is heading down a dark and scary path where if we don't back out soon, we will be doomed. But, hopefully I'm wrong. I mean, I don't want that to happen, so I think that's where we, as future educators, come into play. I won't let English go down without a fight. WHO'S WITH ME??