Observation 1 of the Student Writing Center

I went to the writing center on Wednesday afternoon to get a feel of what goes on during a writing session . I met with one of the tutors there who shook my hand and made me feel very welcome to be sitting in on the session. He quickly took us over to his cubical as we set down he quickly scanned the students paper. He asked her plenty of questions while looking over the paper. In the beginning of the session it was rather quite which soon changed when he got to the part of the paper that needed tweaking. The students paper was sat directly in the middle of the two of them so they were both able to view her writing together. 

When he proceeded to ask her question on her writing none of them were closed ended. Each question that he asked her made her think about the answer she was going to give him that pertained to her paper. She had lots of trouble using past and present tense so he took her paper and showed her a few examples of what past and present was when writing. Not only did he show her on paper, but this was also done out loud so she could hear the differences in the speech. She sat there patiently while he explained and he gave her back her paper and asked her "What did she need to do to fix the sentence?" At first she was still not sure what she needed to do to correct her mistakes so he read her sentence aloud to her several times over and a short time after she was able to pick up on the mistakes she made in her paper. 

What I did notice about the tutor is that he did focus a lot on grammatical errors and punctuation, but not enough to make her feel uncomfortable. From the look of what I saw she has been there several times to fix the first draft of her paper and each time her paper was corrected the better the grade she received. When she walked out of the office she did not walk out with just a corrected paper she walked out with a proper thesis statement, she learned the correct use of past and present tenses and she also walked a way with a paper that he said would get her an A.  Which in Moffetts theory is called  " Cheerleading" as is one of the things you are not supposed to do when tutoring.

During this session he ended up getting another student who had a lot of trouble with past, present, singular and plural form. Although I have been told that a tutor is not allowed to write on a students paper he did. He didn't write comments or suggestions on how the essay could and should be constructed, but what I like about this tutor is that he took the time out to show both of his students the differences between word use in the past and present tense. For this student he took her paper and wrote on the back as well and showed her what singular and plural was.  He also explained to her not to use repetition of words which was done for both of the students.  this student also walked out with fixed paper and a thesis statement that she didn't have when she walked in.