New Techniques

I actually tried two things this last week. One day, I reverse engineered outlines with my students, and another day, I went in with no materials, just me (and water). I've done outlines before (not in such a conscious way), but I always have paper and pen with me! I found that I needed to be aware and present in both situations, just in different ways. However, I didn't feel it had an effect on which of us was the primary agenda-setter.

When I was doing the outlines, I was really paying attention to the macro issues and the narrative structure of each piece. For example, I worked really intensively with a public health/epidemiology grad student on his intro. In this case, the outline really helped me to understand what he was talking about! By looking at what each paragraph conveyed, and how they connected with each other, we were able to find ways to align his text more closely with his verbal explanation of his study. I tutored with this focus for about three hours straight, and by the last person, I was absolutely fried. My last student even said, "you're working way too hard."

Then, the next time I tutored, I went in completely empty-handed, not even a pen--and I refused it when the first student offered me his. "No, no, if anyone's going to write anything down, it'll be you!" I found it was hard to track all of the components of an essay at once, since I didn't have as clear of a starting point for my focus. But it was really freeing when I worked with a non-native speaker who had a solid analysis and mostly needed help with word choice. With another student, we did identify the topic of each paragraph, and talked about how to tie them together better, without making that written outline. I did find that I had to be more conscious about giving the student time to take notes, instead of pausing to take notes together. I didn't find it as tiring--but I also only went for half as long that day!

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