I taught at a non-traditional four-year college where most students were black. I taught a course in Logic and Argumentation that had for its textbook a rigorous approach to logic, heavily weighted towards the courtroom.

By lucky coincidence, the course coincided with a huge court case/… Read full post »

schoolboys 1945

I once taught English classes in a place where the student body would have been almost all-male, had they not offered a "secretarial science" program for the purpose of women attending. Still, I often had classes with no women in them at all, or only one or two.&nb… Read full post »

Socrates condemned to drink hemlock: Is this where the Socratic Method leads?

1787 Jacques Louis David: World History Archive/Alamy 

 Teaching and tutoring are not supposed to be lecturing. Students have to speak up in discussion. Supposedly a good te… Read full post »

 I worked in the tutoring center at Cooper Union, a world-renowned scholarship school with only three majors: Art, Architecture and Engineering. Thus our students fell into three highly distinct types.

The Engineers tended to be foreign and had trouble with saying what they meant, gra… Read full post »

Writing on the rain 

For my Master's Degree thesis I evaluated the academic writing of a student at the University of Texas at Austin. He was someone I used to chat with when I worked in the library, and he'd told me that he taught himself to write.… Read full post »

grade book

For the first few years that I was a teacher and tutor, I gave every student the benefit of a doubt. I accepted their weak work and their excuses, feeling that nothing could be done about it, that I didn't have the right to complain, and most of all,… Read full post »

A teacher is in a strange position. To a young student, she is an authority figure, a surrogate parent, an older friend or aunt. Just as in psychotherapy, strange projections result. The Narration Essay is tricky. Who is it aimed at? Most students feel the audience is their teacher. Students… Read full post »

 

Romeo and Juliet word cloud
coolcards.co.uk/blog

When I was a tutor at Nassau Community College, a student came in whose professor wanted her to work on grammar and sentence structure. Normally I prefer to focus on the paper itself, but this was what he wanted. 

I showed the student… Read full post »

 

 

I was introduced to a woman who was in distress because her son Lawrence was supposed to begin writing the essays for his college applications, but he had dug in his heels, he did not want to write… Read full post »

I tutor a Down Syndrome girl named Connie who is exceedingly bright. I was teaching Connie to read. For her 14th birthday I was browsing a botanical gardens gift shop and saw this book, Sky Tree. The text was approximately a level higher than she could read. It showed/…

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Oliver Twist picks his first pocket.
Even a thief has steady work.

Tutoring is the most dangerous profession. Even a thief has steady work, but a tutor is subject to the whims of other people, governments and budgeting. If she works for a family privately, they can cancel at any… Read full post »

BLOOD WEDDING

When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, I worked in the English Department Writing Lab as a tutor. One day a young student came in, thunked his heavy first-year Literature textbook down onto the desk, sat down and opened it. If I… Read full post »

 

Here is the letter that Leora wrote with me.

 

credit: scrapbooker-writingupastorm 

I have been tutoring a special-needs child for six years, who has grown into a lovely young lady. Leora has Down Syndrome and when I first met her, age 16, she was unable to answer a yes or no question, or understand the concept of 1+1.… Read full post »