discussion, reflections, notes.. (blog 15)

The class discussion was pretty interesting and helpful.  It helped me begin thinking about the different classes of losses, which I had not thought of before.  Two kinds were agenda-related:
- For the Dr. Chandler + Daria session, I wrote down "needs of situation vs. expectation."  I'm trying to remember what I meant by that... Daria didn't have her paper/couldn't revise it (Dr. Chandler's expectations weren't fulfilled), but Dr. Chandler still needed to have a tutoring session (needs of situation)... Okay.


- Then, in reference to a session I had with an ESL student, I wrote down "what I feel student wants vs. what I feel I 'should' do as a tutor."  I was having this internal conflict because the writer's paper was about three pages and was completely marked over in red, and the writer wanted to fix it all.  I knew that looking at just one kind of issue at a time is how I'm *supposed* to do it, but I also was getting the sense that the writer really wanted everything to be fixed, and I didn't think there was time to go through the essay multiple times.  (Plus, she already rewrote -or maybe recopied- the essay, so most of the mistakes were taken care of... and I think she did understand them... there's just a lot to remember when you're writing in another language.)  So I ended up going through the paper with her, looking at errors as we found them.


- And I think I wrote this third class down when we were discussing someone else's session... "how I want to be perceived vs. what I actually know."  I think that characterizes what it's like when there's a problem (or question or whatever) that the tutor doesn't know the answer to, but doesn't want the writer to lose confidence in her because isn't the tutor supposed to know all this stuff?!




So maybe the next step in my notetaking is to start classifying the losses.  That could really help organize everything.


Some other things from the class discussion~
The common thread in all losses is conflict, and I think it might most frequently be internal conflict in the tutor (and I have internal conflict all the time, so I guess this topic is quite fitting!).  Also, as Dr. Chandler put it, it's a "point of inaction."  And perhaps an element of the conflict is struggling to find action.


Time to do some more researching...