Ten Weeks of Tutoring...

In my Introduction to College Writing class that I teach for Kachemak Bay Campus I require my students to tutor writing for the semester. As chance would have it, three of my students wanted to tutor through Connections, and since the academic adviser there was having a hard time finding people who wanted/needed tutoring for their kids, she asked if my kids would like to be tutored. My daughter was flatly not interested, which was about what I expected. When my son found out he would be tutored by a college student (!!) he was intrigued and willing to give it a shot.

After finding a suitable match, Robert (my college student) and Denver began 10 weeks of tutoring. Denver is a forth grader using a middle school reading book. The content is challenging, and though Denver understands the words, the concepts can be more difficult to pull out. Tutoring allowed him to discuss the ideas and concepts and gave him intensive time with a non-authority figure (read: not a parent or teacher!) to explore the ideas presented.

In order to have enough material to go over each week Denver had to spend at least an hour or more reading and writing each day. He didn't appreciate the pressure, and he also found it tedious working from the same reading book every day. We broke things up by saying he would do 3 days of reading and writing in Jamestown (Best Short Stories), 1 day of his vocabulary book which included 2-4 paragraph writing assignments, and 1 day of fun writing that he could write whatever he wanted, which in his case is short stories. This was much more palatable to him and he would look forward to his "fun writing" days.

Through the course of the semester his reading comprehension seemed to improve, as he got fewer questions about the reading wrong. The bottom line, though, was that he really enjoyed the interaction with someone who he could have a conversation with and discuss ideas. He complained that at school he would beg his classmates to give him feedback about his writing, but they never came up with much. This has ended up as a very good experience for Denver and I'm glad that it worked out as well as it did.