Helping a student with a paper on a topic that is not relative to myself has always been a big fear of mine. There are always going to be those students who expect the world of you as a tutor, and it is hard to realize that their thought process of a tutor is skewed. In those cases, that student would be in the wrong. Myself, as a tutor, should not feel ashamed about what I know and don’t know. That is not my role. My role is to look at students’ writings and help them to improve. As long as I continue to remind myself of this, I should be able to overcome this fear.
Another thing talked about in Chapter 12 is how to give feedback in a positive manner. Definitely telling the student about what they did right BEFORE going into detail about what to fix is so important. Students can be so worried about sharing their papers with another person. Just this little step can help them to ease their nerves and feel less like a total failure (not that they are a failure, but that thought has definitely crossed their mind). I also like the idea of thinking big to little. Often, if you address and fix the big problems first, some of the little problems will sort themselves out. This is the smarter approach in my opinion.
