Tuesday, November 5th , 2013 was a special event in my educational life.  I was assigned to perform the task of a tutor for the first time.  I assisted Caroline, a student from ENG099.  At the beginning, I felt little bit nervous, but after shaking hands and a brief introduction with the tutee I relaxed.
      The session started as I asked Caroline about her assignment.  She gave me the article she was supposed to write about and told me that she could not write the draft because she didn't understand what was the article about.  I told her don't worry, we will go over it together.  I read the article silently to have an idea about it, then I told Caroline to read it out loud.  After that, I told her to read the first paragraph and  paraphrase it in her own words.  Caroline was a little bit anxious, and could not express her thought.  I decided then to give her a hint to help her relax and understand that part of the article, then I  told her to explain it to me in her way.  After she explained it to me, I told her to summarize it in one sentence and she did. Then we basically did the same strategy to explain each paragraph of the article. The more we moved from one paragraph to the other one, Caroline looked more relaxed as she started to understand better the article and was able to do what I asked her for.
     [The article was about parenthood, it included five paragraphs in total. In the first paragraph the author explained what people think about parenthood, in the second one he stated his own belief about parenthood, in the third paragraph he included his position that did not agree with what other people think about parenthood, in the fourth paragraph he gave evidence that explained why he took this position, and in the last paragraph he explained why being parents was not an easy task to many adults].
     After we finished explaining the article, I told Caroline to gather all the sentences so that she  forms a summary [that will later on serve as an introduction to her writing draft].  Once again Caroline seemed confused and did not understand what to do.  I told her that we basically got five sentences out of each paragraph of the article, so what we should do next, was to make a small paragraph out of those sentences.  This paragraph will be the introduction of her assigned essay.  Caroline then felt happy, and told me "Oh! now I understand the whole article" Before she started writing her summary I told Caroline, now that you understood the article could you tell me what was your thesis.  She said yes, then she wrote to me a thesis which was away longer than it supposed to be. After, I explained to Caroline that the thesis should be no longer than one sentence, she was able to define her thesis correctly.
      She wrote her summary, and we went over it. The summary was good, but it had the last part of the article in which the author claimed that the society did not prepare adults for parenthood, it also had some grammar mistakes such as subject/verb agreement and word choice. I started to explain some of these mistakes but it was almost the end of the session and we could not complete all of them.
   When we heard our professor telling us that the session was up, Caroline and I packed our belongings.  I told Caroline it was nice to meet her, she told me the same thing. We shook hands and I wished her good luck.