Apprenticeship Session 5: 3/31/08

Again, no student showed up.

Continuing my thoughts from last week, I remember how in high school our teachers would occasionally have us peer-edit each others’ papers. This basically consisted of us swapping papers with the person sitting next to us, reading it, maybe adding a comma or two, and handing it back with a few vague comments. These were usually along the lines of “yeah, it’s good” and occasionally “I really liked it when you talked about . . .”

Now I am learning a very different way of tutoring, one that involves a lot more than syntax and grammar. If writing is a process, tutoring must also be a process. It is tempting to correct everything in the paper in one fell swoop, but at the same time it is very important that we not put words in the students’ mouths. There needs to be a line drawn somewhere, but how do we know where to draw it?

I think that one of the most useful ideas I have heard is trying to get a student to talk about the paper, what he or she is trying to say. I know that this certainly helps me. Sometimes I think that when I write I think too much about it. When I talk, I just want to come out and say it, and then worry about getting it right. When I write there’s a temptation to get it perfect on the very first try, which just doesn’t always happen. It can look perfect, but often it doesn’t say what I want it to. Helping a student to speak in his on words and then offering that back to him is definitely a technique that works. I think it’s a shame I didn’t learn about this earlier.