Today I worked with a student who used Fox News.com as a source of information for an MLA academic paper. This concerned me. Not one of my Literature/English Professors would have allowed this as a credible source. She also didn't understand the word efficacy--a problem because she had to compare and verify efficacy in the product she was researching. I learned today that I can only help a student as much as they want to be helped.
The article "What Does Difficulty Mean in the Writing Center Tutorial" lists the challenging types of students a tutor may encounter. The list includes the student who is: passive, angry, egotistical, learning disabled (but unknown to tutor), has weak writing skills as well as underdeveloped critical thinking skills, to name a few. The tutor has a big job. Sometimes it's not the student, but the instructions or the professor. And sometimes, the author states, "it's the tutor." The author of the article, John Blazina, says that everyone makes mistakes--including tutors. For example, when trying to help a student who had an unknown learning disability, he was brusque and made her cry. Ultimately he learned that she seemed passive because "everything came hard to her." She truly had a hard time getting started and understanding the material. This wasn't the case with my student today. She was just lazy. But the article points out that we can only do so much for students, and that ultimately it's important for tutors to consult with one another. And realize that all of us have much to learn.
http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/56
How did you deal with this challenging student?
ReplyDeleteSorry Liz, I just saw your reply; I'll try to remember this student and how I dealt with her...I think I told her that my professors wanted to see sources with little or no bias, like CNN or The NY Times. She insisted that her teacher didn't care, and I suggested that she may want to check with her teacher. Also, I suggested that if she had to write on something (in this case the efficacy of a product) and she didn't know what efficacy meant that she should look the word up...without a good sense of understanding the instructions she would probably not write a good paper. I grabbed the dictionary and we looked the word up. I then asked her what she understood the word to mean and how that would apply to her product. She seemed ok when she left, and I realized that I could only do so much. It was a good learning experience for me.
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