Blog 16:

well guess what! i finally did my first tutoring session today. the girl was in ESL and came in for help with a marketing paper that she already wrote. she wanted help with her grammer, but on reading her paper, i realized she needed ALOT of help with structure and organization, her grammer was fine, it was also plagiarized. reading what she wrote as opposed to what she copied and pasted there was a definite difference. her structure was ok, since the professor didnt have a clear assignment sheet (basically it said 5-10 pages, include this and that- economy, resources, politics etc 12 pt. font) i didnt know if this was an official paper, had to be cited, footnoted, titled etc. She came in with no introduction or conclusion (guess she couldnt plagiarize that) and didnt know how to write one either. surprisingly, her paper was ok, but had no organization whatsoever. there were sentences that did not belong at all, (ex: colombia has one of the most dense countries with 123e4sdf823sdee4 people per square mile. religion: roman catholic 94.5%. ... next paragraph) she went from speaking of geography to history to location to resources to culture without any way of leading into the next paragraph.
when dr. chandler pointed out that her entire paper was plargrized, she completely SHUT DOWN! it was amazing how her body language changed so quickly and turned against us! it was easier to give her concrete ideas and examples, rules of linguistics (some tips i learned from being in ESL myself) rather than explaining that it doesnt sound right and why did you write it that way? i had to repeat some things i felt a million times because she didn't write them down as i said them, and i felt like she didnt understand alot of what i said, even though i used the most simple language and used tips i learned from my teachers.
i went over the time by 10 minutes, so i have to pay attention to the time. i dont think i ever did not know what to do, i was surprised how easy tutoring actually was, but she was a harder student than i was anticipating.