Summer Tutoring

As a full time student nine months out of the year, the summer months always provide a bit of a quandary as far as how to best spend my time and how to make some money. I've done nannying in the past and this summer I got to spend two mornings a week with a friend's one year old son, which I really enjoyed. I wanted to branch out this summer, though, and perhaps begin to grow a private tutoring business. Craigslist came in handy and I was able to secure three students to do private tutoring sessions with. One man I met with only one time as he was wanting some specific guidance on workplace tone and diction, but the other two students I met with weekly from one to four hours.

This experience was unique for me because unlike a composition classroom in which you spend maybe one hour meeting individually with a student over a fifteen week period, I was able to sit down with these students every single week and speak to them directly about their growth in English and composition, as well as quickly and specifically identify areas where they needed further instruction and practice. The ages, backgrounds, and needs of the two students were very different, but I felt confident that by my final sessions with them they had both grown and achieved higher levels of success in their reading, writing, and comprehension of English.

What struck me most through all of the sessions I conducted this summer was the way that genre studies is so applicable in almost any writing or reading scenario. Genre studies and activity theory are the basic pedagogical ideas that the Illinois State Writing Program is based on. When I first started at ISU I was so confused by the idea of genre studies, and a colleague and I sat down with our WPA to simply say, what is this theory and how do we teach it? Although I was totally unaware of this type of pedagogy, or that ISU taught it, when I enrolled, I am forever grateful that I not only grasped the ideas, but have learned how to effectively teach them. Joyce Walker is the WPA at ISU and her article "Just CHATing" briefly explains genre studies and CHAT. This article is a great gateway to understanding, and helping students understand, the complexity of writing situations both within and outside of the classroom.

Although I didn't get as far on some publication work as I would have liked, I still feel that this summer was well spent. I was able to make some money, begin to work with students in private tutoring, and see the foundation of my learning and understanding grow deeper. The two students that I worked with consistently this summer had this to say about their growth in the sessions:

"Learning about and practicing grammar and writing responses has aided me the most."

"Learning about audience was most helpful to me because each genre of writing can use many audiences, depending on the topic and format."