Liam's English Blog

This week's reading focused primarily on the fundamentals of tutoring and how to tutor effectively. Such a responsibility includes being on task and interested in the material you as a tutor are trying to teach, as well as practicing active listening as a means to facilitate better communication. There are many steps that go into being an effective tutor, such as being ethical, professional, and flexible with those you are tutoring, but a tutor must also be willing to learn on the job as there will always be situations with which you may have no or little experience. In these cases, using what you know as a tutor to adapt and advise is the best you can do. However, it would be best for a tutor to avoid using a corrective style because while this may be useful in the short term, the tutee learns much less as a result of trying to handle their paper quickly. Instead a tutor must take the time to hear their troubles and difficulties and then present a solution through carefully consid...

To my understanding, the reading focused on the reasons for having peer tutoring, as well as why peer tutoring is a beneficial method of teaching. Something I liked in particular about it was the way it questioned, and subsequently answered, why peer tutoring is an effective method of teaching. Not only does this form of teaching benefit those who do not quite understand the material, but in teaching it to others it helps reinforce the material in the minds of the peers doing the teaching. In this way, the text explains to us how peer tutoring is not simply, "the blind leading the blind," but rather students explaining concepts in a language their peers can understand. A question that this poses, however, is the matter of what is the most effective teaching environment if tutoring is such a progressive method of instruction. Does the success of tutoring create a smaller demand for more learned instructors, as all it seems to take is one instructor and several students that gr...

After nine years of writing stories, I see myself as an adaptive writer. I mostenjoy writing fantasy short stories, expressing my knowledge of our world through new characters and environments of my own design. Early memories of writing come closer to writing full short stories, as I used to avoid something if I couldn’t do it perfectly. That in itself became a roadblock when it can’t to essays, but as I’ve said, I am an adaptive writer. After consultation with teachers and peers, I learned to broaden my writing ability. This also helped me develop a mantra for dealing with stress, which is: No matter what it is. It. Will. Pass.