Third Visit

Talk about bizarre, my third visit to the center was exactly that. I got into the room and sat down with Emily. Almost immediately afterwords another student joined us wanting a little assistance with the development of a dance paper. Who knew you had to write about dancing??? To me dance seems simple, flail around and sway your hips...wait maybe that's why I am not a dancer. Although that said I think I am a pretty good dancer while at the lodges and hockey team socials...

Back to the subject of writing, the girl who visited Emily on this day, 3/7/08, needed assistance on a paper about Josephine Baker and the "shuffle". The student had only written one paragraph but was already lost at sea. She was quite confused by the general process of writing and seemed timid to ask questions. Emily quickly defused this by making her feel more comfortable. The paper was quickly edited and then the student left giving Emily and I a chance to sit down and discuss what was wrong with the paper.

The first and foremost problem we had with the paper was that, despite it being only a paragraph long it was filled with quotations. To make it worse, none of the quotes were sourced or cited!!! The student was a senior and she didn't have CITATIONS!!! AH! Emily then began to critic herself about what had occurred in the session. She mentioned that the paper was poorly organized and that the organizational flaws were made more obvious by the fact that the student had an extremely WEAK introduction. Emily admitted that she went way too deep into surface errors and said that she would like to fix this by avoiding a majority of these errors. Lastly the student was very apologetic about the entire paper. The entire session, although brief, was informational and I do feel like I learned a little bit more about the writing process, and how to be a better tutor. Off to Park City, Utah for some skiing and family time!!! CYA after break.