SCC Tutoring

  This Friday, I had the opportunity to tutor a friend of mine who was also studying compsci.  We picked this day during the evening at 8pm since that was the only time he was available to call this week.  Our topic was Data Structures using C++. I definitely needed to review this subject myself and I brought a lot of older materials from previous courses for reference.  I compiled a list of key topics for this course and made sure I had examples for each.  Demonstrations are very important for this topic because following along through abstract explanations can be very confusing.  I checked to see if all the programs were working properly.  The software we used to conduct the tutoring session was Discord since we’ve used it in the past.  It has screen sharing capabilities as well so I could project my Microsoft Visual Studio to showcase the code I was using.  Other than that, it was just making sure I had backup materials in the event that I...

 Hi guys!  This week's module discussed the topic of diversity, equity, and bias.  Diversity is observed as difference in many different categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.  Some of the categories that are not as frequently discussed are disabilities.  Having various health conditions or disabilities like arthritis or dyslexia is also a category that contributes to diversity.  This leads into equity which is the idea that people should receive treatment adequate for their particular needs.  Equity seeks to address the challenges of disadvantaged students.  One of the main examples of this in education is providing financial aid to socioeconomically challenged students who would struggle to stay in school due to tuition costs.  This also applies to interpersonal relationships where we should treat people not just uniformly but rather based on the way they want to be treated. Tutoring is inherently promoting equi...

 Hi guys!  This week's module was about learning strategies for adults with various learning needs.  From the get go, adults learn differently from children.  Children typically need instructors to spoonfeed them information and motivate them through a reward system.  Adults on the other hand actively seek learning for themselves. According to Marcus Knowles, adults take responsibility for their own education and seek learning for their own benefit.  Arthur Chickering lists some helpful tips for peer tutors to provide college students with the necessary internal stability and motivation to become competent adult learners.  This includes developing the students’ studying capabilities as well as guiding their mindset to find their reason and purpose for learning. Not everyone learns the same way and it’s important to tailor your tutoring methods to fit their needs.  This applies to more than disabilities since all humans have quirks and tendencies. ...

 Hi guys!  This week's lesson was about listening and communication.  We learned about listening errors to avoid and the ones that stood out to me were: "1. Calling the subject or speaker uninteresting or boring" and "10. Letting your mind wander". The first point seems very obvious, but perhaps what this point was addressing wasn't the explicit verbal criticism of the subject or speaker.  Instead it's an internal criticism of the subject or speaker that creates a negative impression of the conversation.  To avoid running into the problem, the listener is advised to simply take in what they can at the moment.  I think this is an interesting point because the listening error seems to be more about attitude than action.  If your attitude towards a conversation is negative, you will struggle to focus on what is being said. The second point is kind of similar in the sense that the listener struggles to stay focused or interested in the conversation.  ...

 Hi guys!  This week's lesson on tutoring was very informative about what a tutoring session should look like.  One of the topics from the reading was that tutors shouldn't dominate the discussion.  I definitely have noticed that conversations without back and forth interactions can feel very stale and unproductive.  Tutors aren't professors and the goal of tutoring is to help students better learn the subjects on their own.  The best way in my opinion, is to simply ask the student a lot of questions so they can actively make decisions and arrive at the answers through their own actions.  The way I'm going to try to avoid this is by thinking of myself not as the teacher but as a fellow learner.  The students have topics that they want to work on and I'll be there alongside them. I have yet to start tutoring just yet at SCC and this Wednesday is officially my first day on the job!  After watching Niko's presentation on the 5-step tutoring cycl...

 Hi!  My name is Albert and I'm a CompSci major at Sacramento City College.  I've decided to try out tutoring this semester for Physics 410 since I had a good experience with the class last year.  I haven't started working just yet so I'm very anxious how things will go from here.  Unfortunately things aren't looking too great already caus' this blogpost is my first assignment for my tutoring class and it's already one day late.  I'm juggling a couple difficult classes this semester on top of transfer applications so please forgive me!  Anyway, I'm excited to teach about physics this semester since it's such a fun subject.  In fact, I even added physics as a potential major in my applications!  There are a lot of formulas but they're incredibly intuitive.  You can learn so much just by knowing what values are in them and the relationships they have with each other.  I picked up a lot of experience throughout this course and I'm eage...