ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: a/b on December 30, 2010, 09:19:37 pm
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Is weekly tutoring necessary for English, or is it better to do fortnightly tutoring? I'm an A to A+ student :)
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There's no way that it's a necessity. It'd be nice but fortnightly, even monthly tutoring can be of use. It also depends on how helpful your English teacher is. In most cases you'll use your tutor to supplement your teacher's assistance so frequent sessions aren't essential.
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Get as much guidance as you feel necessary, but the most important thing is that you complete your own work and get this marked by a teacher/tutor.
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There's no way that it's a necessity. It'd be nice but fortnightly, even monthly tutoring can be of use. It also depends on how helpful your English teacher is. In most cases you'll use your tutor to supplement your teacher's assistance so frequent sessions aren't essential.
Hey Lexitu, I'm an A to A+ English student and I am tutored by an English tutor every week. I was just wondering, where a school might give around 4 - 6 writing pieces a year to write, a tutor will ask us to write every week and can correct our work much more thoroughly than an english teacher can. With that being said, how does a student who does not have a tutor achieve high English standards? Is it through the junior years when they used to read alot? Thorough thinking? Because I find it confusing when they have no one to check their work!
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There's no way that it's a necessity. It'd be nice but fortnightly, even monthly tutoring can be of use. It also depends on how helpful your English teacher is. In most cases you'll use your tutor to supplement your teacher's assistance so frequent sessions aren't essential.
Hey Lexitu, I'm an A to A+ English student and I am tutored by an English tutor every week. I was just wondering, where a school might give around 4 - 6 writing pieces a year to write, a tutor will ask us to write every week and can correct our work much more thoroughly than an english teacher can. With that being said, how does a student who does not have a tutor achieve high English standards? Is it through the junior years when they used to read alot? Thorough thinking? Because I find it confusing when they have no one to check their work!
At my school at least, the English department is absolutely amazing. The teachers mark work thoroughly and extremely efficiently - my Lit teacher sent me essays back within the hour, whilst my English teacher usually handed them back the next day.
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^ Wow.. roughly how long did you guys have to wait for your English SACs to be crossmarked and everything, until you got results?
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Hey Water :) I was lucky enough to have a teacher who was happy to give feedback beyond the assigned work that we had. So whenever I felt I wanted to confer some writing/ideas I would go to her with extra work. I think you should expect that from your teacher but if they're slack and you don't have that luxury then I suppose you turn to your tutor. Or yourself. If you critique your own writing a while after you have completed the piece it will be easier to notice its flaws. You could use the assessment criteria to assess yourself. I didn't use a tutor at all so that's what I did. Of course, as you said, reading at a young age and exposing yourself to complex ideas helps too. You just keep challenging yourself. It's fun :)
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Ask yourself why you need a tutor. Yes, a school may be slack in issuing work, but that doesn't mean you can't do like one a week and hand them in. I go to a public school but my teacher was obliging in marking every essay I gave her. My school only issued 4-6 essays a term but hey, it's all down to personal effort. Tutors can just give extra advice to poor students but you're an A+ student so your needs would be leaning towards strenuous marking.
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Ask yourself why you need a tutor. Yes, a school may be slack in issuing work, but that doesn't mean you can't do like one a week and hand them in. I go to a public school but my teacher was obliging in marking every essay I gave her. My school only issued 4-6 essays a term but hey, it's all down to personal effort. Tutors can just give extra advice to poor students but you're an A+ student so your needs would be leaning towards strenuous marking.
Yeah :) I went to a public school as well. It really is your teacher's responsibility to respond to any of your requests within reason. They are professionals. Because others are apathetic doesn't mean you have to be.
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Ask yourself why you need a tutor. Yes, a school may be slack in issuing work, but that doesn't mean you can't do like one a week and hand them in. I go to a public school but my teacher was obliging in marking every essay I gave her. My school only issued 4-6 essays a term but hey, it's all down to personal effort. Tutors can just give extra advice to poor students but you're an A+ student so your needs would be leaning towards strenuous marking.
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The problem with my school, not saying its bad, but the assessment the english teacher handed back after the SAC wasn't so good. This was because, it was always mid 80s and above, for language or context essays it would be 9/10 or 9 and a half out of 10, but i felt it wasn't deserving of such scores, if you get what I mean?
So I leaned towards my tutor and my older brother who would give me more serious critical assessment and man, my older brother did alot of bashing on my work.
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Hmm. Yea get a tutor then LOL. I always wanted a tutor in a way but in the end I didn't bother even for Lit which made me panic. However, if you can, just get people here to mark your essays. We're quite speedy too you know :)
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^ Wow.. roughly how long did you guys have to wait for your English SACs to be crossmarked and everything, until you got results?
It varied from a few days to a week or two depending on what task it was (eg. we got our oral SAC results immediately after all the speeches were finished!).
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However, if you can, just get people here to mark your essays. We're quite speedy too you know :)
i would do that ^ :)
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Thanks guys ! :)
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For a subject like English, high-frequency tuition sessions are unnecessary for an A/A+ student. You can certainly get by fine with fortnightly or even monthly; if you spend the time in between developing ideas and working on essays, you can go to a tutor every so often to get some feedback on your writing, and to help you improve.
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It really doesn't matter how long the gap is between classes. As long as you practice writing essays and ideas for your texts in your own time, you'll get along fine, regardless of whether you have classes every week or fortnight. Private study out of tuition is so important when it comes to realising and understanding what form or style or writing you best suit, and tutoring (and getting essays corrected) is best for developing and refining this style.
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With that being said, how does a student who does not have a tutor achieve high English standards? Is it through the junior years when they used to read alot? Thorough thinking? Because I find it confusing when they have no one to check their work!
Just saw this lol. Personally I read a fair bit beforehand but by year 10 I was an absolutely pathetic reader *still am, DAMN MSN!* but it's definately possible to just read newspapers and really study your texts all year round. If you get bored, read other books by the author for leisure, no analysing, but just getting a feel for the language. And it's not about checking work...like I can't imagine myself in year 8 strenuously writing book reports which contribute no way whatsoever to VCE. I think it's more appreciating the texts you study or at least learning to develop coherent and sophisticated essays which you can do with practice and devotion.
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Well I was in a similar situation at the beginning of this year and found it great having fortnightly tutoring. Our school's English department is excellent, but I found that it was indeed beneficial as it provided me with other ideas and sources of inspiration.
I would recommend fortnightly over weekly, as it gives you more time to prepare pieces as well as develop questions and find any issues you have with the area of study. Any longer eg. monthly, and you may write a number of pieces for your tutor, but may somehow have gotten a bit off-track.