Reading Between the Lines by Anna

Reading Between the Lines by Anna - July 2021 Scholarship Essay

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, but many historians say that slavery did not truly end in several states until 1865. A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea and the Oxford comma is used and widely recognized, but not typically required. Usually, when we walk into a class we know that we’re going to learn about history or facts, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, we learn a little more. In order to become a tutor at my university’s writing center I had to take a course called The Tutoring Practicum where not only did I learn grammar and mechanics, I learned how to interact with students in order to best work with them. While going through this class I learned so many different things about different tutoring techniques, like how to best start out a tutoring session and the various ways to engage with a student. A lot of it seemed like basic common sense and knowledge of grammar, but what surprised me the most was the fact that tutoring became as much about reading body language as it was about reading the words on a paper.
In class, my professor talked about how we needed to pay attention to both the verbal and physical cues that a student was giving us while we were in a session. If they were leaning away from us with their arms crossed while talking, that often meant they were uninterested in what was going on, as opposed to an engaged student who would more likely be leaning forward and being more physically open with their gestures. We also needed to pay attention to body language when asking a question. If I asked a student how to rephrase something and they shook their head or crossed their arms, there was a good chance they didn’t have an answer or weren’t going to attempt to find one. A student who was genuinely thinking about what they wanted to say would still be leaning forward, often studying their paper, or would assume classic “thinking poses” like a hand to their mouth or resting their chin on their hand. This pose meant to leave the student alone and let them work things out for themselves, while students who appeared to not be trying were the ones I would try to engage by rewording my question or breaking it down into smaller pieces until they had an idea of what to do. As someone who had never been formally trained in how to tutor, I had assumed it was just pointing at a student’s work and telling them where to fix things, but this wasn’t the case. Not only did I have to be up-to-date with all my grammatical knowledge, but I had to be confident in my ability to listen to what a student was telling me, both verbally and physically, while engaging in a tutoring session with them.