5th blog post - Dina Seremet

Last week, I attended my first English tutoring session at the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for health careers. We met at the Writer’s Room first and then walked over to the school. On our walk over, I had no idea what to expect. I hoped that my previous experience of tutoring high school students would help me with this new tutoring experience. I was nervous to help high school students with English because I was worried they would be better at English than me and I would be of no use. That day, I helped Dr. Madson’s eleventh grade English class. The students were editing their introduction paragraphs and theses from their midterm exams. I sat at a table with a group of three students. I was asked to work specifically with one of the students at the table. He was writing about a play called the Piano Lesson. The tutoring did not go as I expected. Since junior year of high school, I have tutored someone in my high school every week for an hour. This was because I was part of the National Honor Society. As a requirement for this honor society, we needed to tutor someone in any subject once a week. I often tutored in biology, physics, or math. My tutoring experience in high school was quite different from what I experienced last week. This could possibly be because all the students that I tutored when I was in high school had very similar backgrounds to me. We all lived in the same town and grew up in the same school systems. For this tutoring session, I knew nothing about the school or even the location of Boston. I had no prior knowledge of anything regarding the students. I didn’t know their level of English or previous background on education. Just like the memes, we discussed in class, sometimes when you don’t have prior knowledge of something, it could make it more difficult to understand. 

During my tutoring session, the boy was very quiet and didn’t ask me any questions. We worked on editing his thesis for two hours. We moved at a slow pace and I am not sure I was much help to him. I asked him various questions about his paper, but all he responded was with “I don’t know”. Thus, it was quite difficult to get anything done. When I asked him if he could go into more detail about something, he told me he didn’t remember what happened in the play or even the characters in the play. It was definitely a new experience and very eye-opening. Prior to reading his writing, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to help him in English. This is because I think that I am really bad at English. However, this experience further showed me that there are many different levels in English. Not everyone is on the same level when they are in eleventh grade, each person has their own strengths and weaknesses. This was definitely a learning experience for me. I need to learn to be even more patient and understanding.