Blog #4 - Tutoring Session w/ Vanessa

I really enjoyed my tutoring session with Vanessa and I felt that I learned a lot as the student while observing her acted as the tutor. During our session, Vanessa asked me to make a list of main ideas from the Lunsford reading that I thought were important and could help me in creating my response essay. She asked me to narrow down my choices to the one that I felt most comfortable writing with, the one main idea that I either totally agreed or disagreed with. When I finally decided to write my response essay on "collaboration and why it works", Vanessa directed me to do the clustering method wherein I wrote the main idea in the middle of the page and circled it, then wrote ideas relating to that idea around it, creating a web. She asked me to do the same method for the "cons of collaboration" in order to see the other side of the argument. We looked at both clustered webs and decided to stick with "collaboration and why it works" since it had the most information out of the two which related to their respective main ideas.

By the end of the the tutoring session, I had a "battle plan", if you will, on how I was going to tackle this task of writing my response essay - I will first summarize why collaboration works and then respond by giving reasons on why I agree with Lunsford.

As the tutor, I felt that Vanessa conducted this session as if she was showing me a picture. We both looked at this picture and dug/looked closely at it in order to find the details that made this picture so important. She did not force me to begin writing my paper during the session; instead, she paved the way in order for me to find my focus, planning out the path that I was going to take in writing my essay, so that at home, when she's not there to help me, I'll know exactly what to do and hopefully, get the job done right.