I have worked with two or three nontraditional students in the writing room, applying the rules of standard tutoring thus far during my sessions. I found this reading selection about nontraditional students to be very true from my experiences. I have had some nontraditional students who have nearly no confidence in their abilities as well as ones who were set in their ways and were perhaps over-confident. Tutoring these students has not been very different from traditional students. The only session where I truly noticed a difference is one where the student did not want to hear any of my suggestions. She was very confident in her writing structure and word flow. I only made a few suggestions such as how to better open the paper and how to make a more concise thesis statement. She informed me these were not issues she was worried about; she was only concerned with some grammar questions. I felt that she was a good writing student and had already felt she had good writing habits, which is not untrue. However, I believe that everyone has something to benefit from another person's perspective or opinion.
So, I'm going a bit off topic now. I finally had a session where I was FORCED to use non-directive tutoring. I had the "clueless" student, like from the roleplays we did in class. I had NOTHING to go off of. The student brought me two articles and an outline from an old assignment (which was different from his current one). He brought me no prompt, and claimed that he was not sure what his teacher wanted him to do. I made some suggestions about maybe he might be doing a comparative essay or something to that effect and he responded "I guess" to each of my suggestions. Everytime I asked him what he meant to write about he told me that he didn't know. I finally asked him what it was that he wanted me to do, which he also responded that he didn't know. By the end of the session, I made a little outline for him about how a comparative essay is set up. I also took some notes down about what he felt on the topic of the paper. Somehow, this seemed to appease him, and he thanked me and left. I did not have a clue about what else to do! If someone has a different idea on how I should have handled the situation, comments are welcome!
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I haven't experienced tutoring a nontraditional student yet, but when I observed, I noticed they had lot of the qualities the author included in the writing. There is a woman that comes in quite frequently who is older and she is just not very confident in her work. She has children at home and is going back to school to get a degree, so I think she has a lot on her mind. Sometimes she gets help with grammar, but I heard her tell her consultant the other day that she didn't understand the assignment and the teacher's instructions weren't very helpful. I don't think nontraditional students are much different than regular students, ESL students, or student with learning disabilites because they all have different stories, but they all need help because they usually aren't very confident in their work, are ashamed or scared to enter the writing center, and they're insecure. I think our goal as tutors should be to make every student that comes in comfortable, so they can feel at ease while getting help with their paper. We should also ask specific questions so we don't assume something and turn out to be wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me like you handled your resistant student very well, Steph. The only suggestion I would make would be to next time educate the student about what the writing center is there to do. Maybe something along the lines of, "I'm so glad you came in for help getting started. We are absolutely here to help students in the planning part of the writing process. But we could help you even more if you brought in an assignment sheet and maybe had some questions for me, or even a general idea of where you want to go, or even two or three ideas!"
ReplyDeleteI think our "resistant" students sometimes just don't understand what a tutoring session is intended to do. They probably haven't given it much thought. Someone has told them to go to the writing center for help on a paper, and they show up, with a vague idea that we are going to "help" them, without realizing that they need to know what sort of help they need. It sounds like you did everything right. I'm just trying to help you see how part of our job as tutors is to help clients understand what a writing center does, just as part of my job as a faculty member is to help other professors understand what a writing center does!