So I’m meeting again with one of my science tutees. As usual, I started off by asking what he wanted to work on that day.
He didn’t know. Not because he’s a slacker. But because, he explained in earnest and slightly frustrated confusion, because he wasn’t sure what precisely it was that he was having trouble with.
It took some reassuring on my part that This is okay, and that figuring out where one is having problems is part of the whole learning and tutoring processes. You have to be able to identify where and how things aren’t going well before you can address the issues.
So we sat down with the materials and started going over different ways of reviewing things, as I asked him what had or hadn’t worked well for him before as studying techniques. And not surprisingly, he couldn’t say. Meaning, he wasn’t able to answer that question simply from my verbal enquiry. It was also difficult to pull up random examples just off the top of his head. His experiences had not been encoded into his memory as analyses, so the search came up empty. And I quite understood that. After all, if he already knew what he needed in the way of study methods that worked well for him, he wouldn’t be in such need of tutoring! Sometimes we tutor content, and sometimes (like here) we tutor process. And process is trickier, because people don’t learn things the same way (e.g. flash cards don’t work for everyone).
Further into the session, the stress levels were getting reduced, and we were able to focus on a particular issue. He had to be able to distinguish between pictures of different kinds of human tissues, and in the study lab had run into frustration trying to explain to someone else that he “couldn’t see” what they were talking about.
Ah-ha … now I understood what was going on. Read the rest of this entry »
