My Experience Tutoring

In my ESL classes I usually have over 20 students at a time, so tutoring does not really happen. I think meeting students during office hours can be classified as tutoring, so I will talk about that.

I have done some ESL tutoring outside of office hours, and I generally didn’t like it.  I think the reason was that the goals of the session were unclear to me.  I once tutored two ESL students for the company that they worked for, and found that it was frustrating because the students did not really make much progress during the two months that I spent with them.  It was boring to me to have only two students in front of me—I liked the dynamic social aspect of the larger classroom.  Of course these frustrations were due to my own failings—the students didn’t make enough progress because my goals were not well defined and I didn’t really have a plan for them.  Also, students should not be expected to entertain the teacher!  These tutoring sessions happened many years ago, and I hope that if I were in the same situation again I would be more mature and prepared to help the students than I was then.

Office hour meetings in my current job are much more successful.  The biggest problem is that I wish students would come more often; more often than not I am alone reading essays during office hours.  Once I can get them to come see me (sometimes I have to tell them directly, write on their paper, or give them some incentive to come see me), I feel like our time is productively spent.   I usually know the student and their work (as well as the expectations of the instructor—me!) so those problems don’t occur.  Generally I think things go well and we achieve our goals.  I can remember a few times when they did not, or when the session was frustrating.  I had one student who was a victim of several instances of brain trauma.  She was diagnosed with several learning disabilities, and had a lot of issues with inappropriate social interactions too.  It was useful to have her come to office hours because she needed extra time especially with understanding the requirements of the assignments.  She would get upset in class when some student asked too many questions and “dominated the class,” but she would do the same thing herself (isn’t it funny how we are usually the perpetrators of the things that annoy us in other people?); as a result, sometimes I would have to answer her in class questions with, “Good question!  Come to office hour and we will discuss that.”

In the office hour session, it was sometimes difficult to explain something (that other students grasped easily) several times, each in a different way.  Sometimes she would not accept my explanation.  The whole time I worked with her I was conferring with a DSS (Disabled Student Services) counselor.  This counselor helped me a lot to know what I could expect and what was too much, or what was inappropriate for the student to do or expect.  There were times when I had to just accept that the student was not going to understand what we were talking about that day; interestingly, though, she was able to come around to an understanding at some later point in time.  I had to use my usual teaching and patience skills, but just expand them to take into account the student’s time frame and learning patterns.  By the end of the semester the student had improved her grade from a low D- to a high C+.  I was happy with the progress she had made and I was proud of my own work with her.  It was a difficult semester (at one point she reported me to the chair of the department for several made up reasons), but at the end I felt she had the skills necessary to move on to the next level of English, and I was proud that I was able to help her overcome those difficulties.