Reactions

The idea of privatizing schools is becoming widely popular across the nation, leaving many feeling helpless as large corporations such as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) take control of the destiny of our public school system. To give a brief description of what ALEC does, they are a corporate-funded partnership between huge global corporations and state legislators who vote behind closed doors in attempts to change state laws to better benefit their members. ALEC has an entire committee dedicated just to public schools, working with these huge global corporations, many of who have never educated a soul in their lifetime, to adjust schools to their needs. A major issue coming up is the idea of slowly but surely demolishing the public school system and privatizing them, which would in turn leave hundreds to thousands of public school educators, principles and even supervisors jobless, and bring in inexperienced six-week trainees to take on their jobs and drill students with test-based materials in order to benefit these corporations. Their idea is to turn the public school system into a business, with complete disregard to how this may affect the students. They are students after all, not factory workers who can simply adapt to an overnight change on how their education is being presented, especially when that change seems to have none of their interests at heart, they are being used to make profits for these huge global companies and their partners in crime, ALEC.

Fourth Session

During my final observation, I observed a tutor who was working with two students in one session, and with another observer besides myself. She didn't specify how she would divide the time she spent with each, she just began with a student she was already familiar with and began to read her paper to herself, since the paper had already been handed and graded by the professor. Throughout her reading her paper on bailouts regarding the bank systems and such, she agrees with many of the points the student has made, and when she is done reading she only suggests that at some points the student has gotten off topic and redirects some of those points into arguments that fit better. The student then shows her a revised version of this paper and the tutor reads through a bit and then tells her this version is much better. She asks her questions such as what a bailout is, what it was supposed to do, what it really did and so on. After asking her these questions she asks her to expand on those answers and leaves her to create stronger arguments based on that.

The other student's paper is about not just texting and driving, but about how talking on the phone even with a headset while driving should be banned. She looks over his paper and his assignment task and asks him what he thinks it should be about before explaining that his paper is great, has good quotes and statistics, but that his main assignment is to discuss what legal bans and laws they can make to impose for this issue. She suggests focusing on the law aspect and also suggests some slight reorganizing of his ideas. Overall I believe what made this a good session was how knowledgeable the tutor was on both subjects the students were discussing. I think her questions really helped each student either expand or focus their ideas, creating a successful session.

Live Tutoring Observation

During my first live tutoring session, my student unfortunately did not have her gentrification paper with her. She asked me to wait while she ran to print it, but after almost 40 minutes she came back and said the line was too long and she couldn't print it out for me. So for the remaining 15 minutes that we had together, I asked her what ideas and arguments she had so far in her paper. She couldn't really remember much of what she had written, which made it difficult to assess how she was doing. I asked her if she could give me a general summary of her thesis and some of her paragraphs, and she was unable to tell me what her thesis was about, but she gave me little tidbits from her other main paragraphs, so I just helped her sort some of her ideas together. I felt like I couldn't do much without her paper being there and her lack of memory, so I asked if she had her readings. She showed me a few of them and let me read them myself when I asked her what they were about, and I tried to work together with her on what points she could use in her paper to strengthen her arguments. The last thing I found to work on with her was finally to have her tell me what a "reintegration" sentence is, and what she had come up with because her professor wanted her to use one. She flipped through her notes and showed me what she had written down as a definition for reintegration, and together we agreed that somewhere in the conclusion she should add it in to mainly summarize and focus on her argument.
During the session I tried to take down some notes here and there, and also tried to come up with a plan of action for when I left. I wrote down a few things for her such as reorganizing common ideas together, making a clearer thesis and argument if she felt they were a bit fuzzy, and coming up with a good reintegration sentence. Overall it was a difficult session, I found it hard to find things to talk to her about because her paper was not in front of me and she didn't remember enough of what she wrote for me to really help her as much as I wish I could have.

Third Session

      During my third session, I observed a tutor whose first words to the student and I were that during his last few sessions where an observer had been present, the student had been less receptive to criticism and help and he was certain that it was because someone else was present. After that he read through the students paper and the professor's comments to himself, which took a little long. I wondered why he didn't read it aloud with the student, but then realized it was probably because the student had already handed it in, so making it a better paper was probably more about adjusting it to the professor's comments. When he finally starts talking to the student, he suggests moving some things around. He finds certain sentences in one part of the paper that he feels would fit better in another paragraph.
     What was really good about this tutor was that he had done this particular assignment before, and had actually taken that same class as the student, and was really knowledgeable about the subject. He was able to offer a lot of different ways to think about her writing, and would occasionally throw out there how he liked how she had worded a specific sentence or so out there. Overall I didn't think this tutor came out particularly as the friendliest or the most engaging, however I think in his own way he was able to help the student and she came out with better insight thanks to his knowledge and also a plan of action regarding how she could fix this paper.