EMK

Last week I volunteered at the EMK for the first time and it was definitely a new experience for me. I’ve had tutoring experience from high school, but I tutored in a different setting and in different subjects. I tutored in biology, chemistry, anatomy, and physics all for about a year or two each. It was usually with people that were either in my own grade or younger, and they would at least be familiar to me to some extent. However, I have never tutored in writing, so coming to the EMK and being introduced to a set of students I had never met before was a little intimidating at first. After some brief introductions–names, pronouns, where you’re from, majors, et cetera–each of the members of my group partnered up with one of the students in the class. My partner and I were moved to a separate room with another partnership so we could have a quieter space to work in. The assignment for the class was to work on thesis statements and introduction paragraphs for an essay, and if they got far enough, start their first body paragraphs. She was writing her essay about a poem whose author I can’t quite remember right now but it was about the poet’s attitude towards New York City life. I think my biggest difficulty in this session was that I really had no prior knowledge of the poem before coming into the EMK, so I had to form my own interpretation of the work in order to help the girl I was working with on her essay. It was a very short poem, but I could see this as being problematic if this was a book or even a longer article that I would have to read. I would feel bad if I had to spend a significant amount of time trying to understand the reference material instead of actually helping out with someone’s writing assignment. Another issue I faced was that I felt like I was writing the essay for her and I wasn’t sure if she actually agreed with the suggestions I made or was just copying things down. I did my best to keep myself pretty open-ended when offering advice, but I still felt like I was doing too much work trying to figure out how to do the assignment myself. I definitely need some more practice working and helping in this particular way, and a large component of that is patience. You can’t teach someone how to have an idea, and that’s something I have a tendency to struggle with in my own writing. Sometimes you might be able to lead someone to it, but it’s really sheer luck that causes it to happen. I’m generally pretty good at editing in terms of grammar and word choice, but these future EMK sessions are really going to help me understand how to work on and teach the more creative aspects of writing.