So much for “daily” thoughts amirite?

As one can infer from the title, I have started a tutoring job in addition to continuing my summer internship part-time as well as attending remote classes. So yes I have been kinda way too busy to type these blog posts until this weekend, when homework has died down a little.

Who even hired me as a tutor anyways?

CMU’s Student Academic Success Center did, after I applied for it and took a half-semester long training course last spring. Even after the bit of training I feel very inexperienced and have been doing a lot of learning on-the-job.

How many tutees are ya tutling?

I have no idea if those are actual words. Six, split equally across Saturday and Tuesday. This slots into my schedule fairly nicely.

What do you tutle?

I will use this word even if it doesn’t exist so help me. A class know inside CMU as 15-151, “Concepts,” or “Prof. Mackey enlightens you while downing a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.” I would call it “Introduction to proofs and computer science theory maths” but that’s not as formal as the real course title (which I do not remember because it is so boring and besides, the other titles are much better anyways). 15-151 is a proof-heavy class which is really challenging if you’ve never done math proofs before. I was in that boat my Freshman year, but I quickly learned how to paddle and ended up with a pretty good understanding of the material (I think). The students coming to me also have problems in a similar vein, ranging from not knowing strategies on how to write proofs, not knowing enough definitions, not easily grasping how to apply the definitons, and overall low confidence in their own ability after having been beat down by the first homework.

This is not to disparage any of them. Anyone coming into CMU is already leagues above the average in terms of problem-solving and general mathematical ability. All of them really do know how to solve these problems, given enough time. Writing and thinking in the language of proofs is proving difficult.

How do you go about tutoring?

For the introductory sessions that happened this week, my main goal was to get to know the tutees and understand where each of them was struggling by watching them work through practice problems. I don’t have a rigorous classification system yet, but this exercise was helpful for me and I hope for the tutees as well to get immediate feedback on some of their problems.

I anticipate that the Tuesday sessions will be fairly productive because homework is assigned and due every Wednesay, so the three tutees I have then will bring plenty of questions to work on. I am allowed to help them with their homework directly (benefit of going to the official Student Academic Success Center!), only by leading them with directed questions and not flat-out giving them the answer, though.

I wanna be tutored by you!

sorry i’m too busy as it is :)

Instead of these posts being daily, I’ll still try to make them weekly. The tag will still be “daily thoughts” because I want to keep all of these related posts in one category.