ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: Jdog on December 19, 2011, 02:57:47 pm
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Hi Guys,
I;ve noticed quite a few of you have volunteered for tutoring etc, I was just wondering how is it possible for a student to tutor another student in english, when they have done different contexts, and texts. I received a pretty good score for english and want to help other students but have been limited by my lack of knowledge of other texts. How do other tutors get past this? I mean personally, I would want a tutor that knew more about the text than me. SO if there are any tutors out there or would be tutors for english, can you guys tell me how you plan to approach this problem.
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I'm going to try and tutor English next year and I'm going to try and familiarise myself with different contexts and texts and for longer term students I would go the effort and actually read the novels. However, there is quite a bit of help you can give your students without reading their texts at all like introducing them to different forms in context, structure in text response, conventions in essay writing, general cohesion, approaches to answering topics/prompts and exam advice. Then there is of course LA and oral SAC which is standard to all students.
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yeah, but still as a student wouldn't you want your teacher / tutor to know alot about your novel and to help you with ideas and how to approach different questions etc?
anyone who has tutored and is willing to share how they approached it would be awesome
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Reading the book would be a good place to start ;)
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yeah no shit mate,
but i wouldn't be able to give them insightful help, since if I was to take on 3-4 students, I would be reading up on all their books, +juggling my own study + marking their essays etc..
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I know that EZ had to read and analyse Ransom for a member on here, even though he didn't study it
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Yeah look being an English tutor is something that can't be done on a whim (not saying you are).
If you want to tutor well you'd probably have to go through and read a lot of the major texts just in order to compete with the other tutors out there. Yes it's a big investment in terms of time, but I don't think anyone should tutor english if they're not willing to do that.
EZ and Josh both read a crapload of texts for their students, and are getting together these holidays and reading some more + making notes on them. That's the sort of thing I reckon you should be doing if you're gonna tutor english.
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yeah no shit mate,
but i wouldn't be able to give them insightful help, since if I was to take on 3-4 students, I would be reading up on all their books, +juggling my own study + marking their essays etc..
Are you sure you want to tutor then?
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yeah I think I have a lot to offer for students in terms of essay feedback and structure and stuff. I was actually reading your tutoring ad when this question came to mind.
How do you plan to tackle different contexts? Ones that you have never experienced or known to adapt texts to?
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yeah I think I have a lot to offer for students in terms of essay feedback and structure and stuff. I was actually reading your tutoring ad when this question came to mind.
How do you plan to tackle different contexts? Ones that you have never experienced or known to adapt texts to?
Fair enough.
In that case you have three options IMO:
1) Only tutor students from your school/same texts
2) Read the books
3) Stick to math/sci tuition.
Read their texts, study design and look around on VN to first get a general idea. Its best to also talk to people who did that context at their school. In terms of TR, I'm reading and going through the texts with some other English tutor friends. At the moment my students are doing only one different text from what I studied though.
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the problem I have is that my school changed every single text we did this year, and also changed the entire context. Otherwise it would have been quite easy for me to tutor scotch students.
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I know that EZ had to read and analyse Ransom for a member on here, even though he didn't study it
Keep in mind in relation to my form of tutoring is that I study English at uni, where you're expected to study a new text every single week. That, coupled with my extensive experience with literary analysis/academic writing in general, means that I'm probably much more adept than most are at drawing out the key concepts in a text in a short period of time. For instance, I only read Ransom once and really only spent about an hour afterwards thinking about it, but I think people like burbs will testify to the fact that just from that amount of work I knew the text pretty thoroughly.
The other thing worth noting is that it actually helps tutoring a lot of students, as opposed to a few, I find. Because so much of English is based upon discussion, I think any English teacher is bound to learn something from their students as well. I had a lot of my own ideas about texts, but there were odd bits and pieces which I picked up from reading students' essays (which made me go "oooh that's interesting", with subsequent noting-down-ing). This helped my tutoring in the long run, since through teaching a text I gained a more comprehensive understanding of said text.