My First Observation

I went to the Writing Center for my first observation and I must say it went great! I went thinking it was going to be awful for some reason. I myself have trouble writing, so how am I going to be able to tutor someone else who has the same issue as me. Fortunately, my first tutoring observation session was with a tutor that has tutored me before more than once. I see her as a very helpful person and has helped me get A's in my papers thanks to her tutoring skills.

I observed an ENG99 student who had to write about a relationship that changed him in the past. When we first started the tutor was so professional and greeted him and made him feel welcomed. the student decided to write about his ex girlfriend, which I thought was too personal. The tutor said that it was indeed a personal thing to write about but to only write what he felt comfortable writing that even though the paper asked for details he didn't have to be specific. The student had already written his introduction but wasn't sure what else to write. The tutor told him that the best thing to do was to PRE-WRITE, that that would help him gather all his ideas and make the writing simple. She kept saying that its better to take the essay piece by piece instead of trying to do all things at once. She asked him what his professor was looking for in the paper, this is something we went over in class. The tutor helped the student gather his ideas by asking him so many questions like "What make you say that? What do you mean by this? Say that another way? who benefits from this? Read it to yourself, does it make sense? Is it enough? Give me more info". In other words not once did she point out a grammatical error or as we know correcting errors. Since the student already had an introduction she encouraged him by telling him that it was good, even though she told him to change it a bit at the end.What I found to be weird was that the student kept wanting the tutor to answer all the questions or give him the exact sentences to write, but she didn't. She asked would just rephrase the questions until he answered it, she would make him write his answers. By the end of the session all he needed was his conclusion, the tutor told him that all he had to do was rephrase his introduction. Overall the skills the tutor has are amazing and she helped the student so much that I think he left the Writing Center with an A paper to give to his professor