Tutoring Session #1

I tutored Julia on Wednesday. We worked on a paper about gun violence. I went into this tutoring session very nervous. I guess that's an obvious thing for most of us in this class. There's a boy named Kevin who is a tutor at the writing center who have another class with. I kept him back one day to ask him for some tips because he had taken this course before which is what made him begin tutoring. With everything he told me and everything I learned from this class, you'd think I would've been better prepared...but no. I did everything that I was supposed to avoid. In my defense, I really felt as though there were nothing else I could do. As I read her paper, I wondered to myself why she was even in the eng 99 class. I guess I kind of had it in my head that all the 99 students didn't speak english as their first language. This girl spoke perfect english and she wrote a paper that sounded almost exaclty like something I would've written myself. Her organization was fine. There were a few grammatical errors here and there. Her biggest problem was her development. Her body paragraphs were fine. However, her introduction and conclusion paragraphs needed work. So, I focused on those two the most. Once I got through with that, I asked her if she needed help with anything in particular or if she had any questions. She mentioned that she had spoken to another tutor and she suggested that two of the paragraphs be switched, but when I read it the way she had it as opposed to how this tutor suggested to have it, I felt Julia's order was much better. So, I told her to leave it as is. She also had left out a personal experience tying into the story which was part of the question. So, I told her that she had to make sure to do so because it might cause an automatic failing grade on the Catw. After that, I couldn't help but to focus on the grammar errors. We corrected them together, and once again, I was at a loss of things to work on. I asked her if there were any other papers she might've been working on that I could possibly help with, but she didn't. We still had a half hour to go and I didn't know what to do, so I began to ask her how she felt about the class and the things she was nervous about. The conversation stretched out for the next half hour and that was my first experience tutoring.
I feel bad that I wasn't able to help more, but at the same time I honestly feel that she is a good student and that she will do fine on this test. She has taken it twice before and has failed by 2pts the first time and 1pt the second time. I was scared that she was sitting there thinking, "Oh this girl is dumb, she clearly doesn't know what she's doing," but it turned out that she thought I did a good job and she wants to have me as her tutor again in the future.