Tutoring Reflection

I tutored a young girl named Rhia, name has been changed for privacy, she is a GED student in her last class before getting her GED. The class is the equivalent of a senior English course. Rhia approached me to help her with a particular assignment because she is not a confident reader and had no prior knowledge of textual annotation and little on textual analysis. The assignment was to choose a book the met specific given requirements, keep a chapter log on textual events, as well a personal reflections to the text. After reading the text the student was to complete a paper using one of the textual analysis lenses to evaluate it.

The book The Poisonwood Bible by Barbra Kingsolver was chosen. To complete the chapter log requirement we decided to do textual annotations. This method ended up working quite well for bother Rhia and I. It allowed her to remember key events as well as interesting facts. When she had a question she was able to just write it down to be discussed at a later time. This was particularly helpful in the case of vocabulary terms and symbolism.

Looking back I believe that the time line of the assignment could have been rearrange, giving longer time for particularly trying chapters or perhaps giving some type of overview of the vocabulary terms in the book and a general list of archetypes and symbolism. I believe that these ideas could have been implemented as earlier lessons, perhaps even before the assignment of the reading. I thought that the evaluation and use of the textual lenses was very interesting, especially seeing someone who was unfamiliar with them beginning to use them and view the text in a different way.

Over all I feel confident in that Rhia will be able to continue to use the ideas taught through this assignment. I believe she is a more confident reader and she is more willing to accept challenging texts because of the use of annotations and reflections. Personally, I think that there is no better way to read then the use of annotations, but that is my opinion. The one thing I would do different as a whole would be to choose a book that I was familiar with or had already read so that we were not going through the reading and analysis process together. I think that would have allowed for a more defined role of leadership and clarity on my part. I enjoyed this opportunity and will definitely take some things I learned into the classroom with me.