Blog Post #6- Abby Jiminian

Today in service learning tutoring at the BTU I had another positive and eye opening experience. The student I was working with this time was the same student I had been working with last week. When the student told me the work that they had completed in the week since last time I was super happy with their progress. The student had made many steps in progressing their overall work and was very open with talking about their creative process which I appreciated. In fact the student came over to where I was seated because they saw me and was excited to see that they could work with me again in the writers room. For their natural disasters project my student was already done with almost all of the research and had already written three of the subtopics and the paragraphs that went along with it. All we had to do together was finish the last two subtopic paragraphs and add anymore research if needed. The student was very receptive to my feedback and seemed to be on perfect track. The student even allowed me to go through their paragraphs and fix their grammar and spelling errors so that when they started typing their information was clear and coherent. 

The student told me that they appreciated the time that they were able to put in with me because of how productive both sessions had been. This was a small affirmation from the student that brought a small smile to my face because I was happy to know that I was being helpful and that the student liked my help. They told me that they felt super productive every time they came in the Writers Room to work with me. The student had mentioned that they struggled with trying to stay focused in the classroom because of the multiple distractions there. However, they told me that being able to work on the paragraphs and research in a more quiet and individualized setting proved to be very helpful to the students ability to do their work well. I think the student also appreciated the open conversation we were able to have about reworking sentences and sentence fluency. Being able to bounce their ideas off of me and see if they made sense before they wrote them down was super helpful when the student was trying to write new paragraphs and ideas without copying. I allowed the student to take a nice break at the end of the session because they had finished writing all of their paragraphs in our session. I know they were appreciative of that because they had said thank you because their brain was completely fried after all the hard work that was put in. I have started to really enjoy working on this project and see the students overall in the writers room get lots of work done in the sessions there. The program there is very good at helping students get their work done but also allowing them to have fun and form relationships with their tutors