I've started to notice a trend in the advice I'm giving to students. I've been getting a lot of Freshman comp students and other lit courses, which works out well with the whole English Major thing, but I seem to tell all of them to "make sure your 'thesis' encompasses everything you're saying in your paper, make sure your 'topic sentence' encompasses everything you say in the paragraph, and then double check and make sure every topic sentence relates back to your thesis." For the most part everyone seems really happy with this advice. I don't just come out and say these things, but these seem to be the underlying problems that emerge when we dig into the students' struggles. But it still kind of bothers me that I'm turning into "Generic Advice Man." That's not a major problem if the advice works, but yesterday I had my first student that didn't leaving with an abounding sense of confidence in the things we decided she needed to work on. She came in because she had turned in a rough draft and her teacher didn't like her thesis. So Thesis was a problem we had to dive into right away. I don't really like this approach; I would prefer to discuss the content of the paper and allow the student to come to the realization that maybe her thesis doesn't quite fulfill it's function, maybe she doesn't make it clear exactly what she's trying to say, or maybe she needs to figure out for herself exactly what she's trying before trying to express it in the form of a thesis. But this is not how it happened yesterday. When she said she wanted to work on the thesis I started asking questions like "What is the paper about?" and "what main points are you trying to argue?" I didn't get very clear answers to these questions, so I probably should not have moved on to the thesis itself, but I did anyway. It was very unclear. I tried to help her make it better, but it just wasn't working. I kept asking her to clearly explain to me exactly what it was that her paper was about. She seemed to get better at this, but whe she's get to key points of fulfilling her assignment, she seemed to buckle and net even understand herself what she was talking about it her paper. So I did a lot of explaining why the things she said weren't fulfilling her requirement, what she needed to work on, an as far as the thesis went, I ended up making her clearly and concisely explain each main point and then I would write it down, and after we made it through all of her points I gave her the sheet of paper and told her that all of that information needed to make it into her paper. She stayed 15 minutes after her appointment ended, and when she left she still just seemed really under-confident as to what she was going to work on when she got home. I don't really know if I did anything wrong. I don't know exactly what I could have done better. I do think I could have somehow given her some more confidence. I talked to Jim about this and he said he doesn't really like to use the words "thesis" and "topic sentence;" he prefers to just discuss the argument they are trying to present--to step away from the paper. I think this approach may have worked in my situation. If nothing else, an open discussion would have helped her confidence. She did have thesis problems that needed to be addressed, but maybe we dwelled a little too much on these problems and didn't do enough positive feedback on the overall content of her paper. These are things I can work on and experiment with. Maybe some day I'll be a perfect tutor.
Posted by hoga0094 at October 1, 2004 1:07 PM