Posts Tagged tutoring
September 06
Mindmaps
Mindmaps are one of those controversial things: educators teach them, and some insist on their use; some people love them, and others despise them. I think there are times when we all need a mindmap. Having the visual input to organization is invaluable in certain situations. The image above is an outline for a mindmap, [...]
July 05
Canadian Content
Canadian Content (6th Edition), by Sarah Norton and Nell Waldman I know, I know, not all of you are Canadian. That’s alright; this isn’t a book about grammar rules, so you won’t get confused. I’ve had this book for many years (I have the 4th edition, actually), and use it several times per week. It’s [...]
June 07
Passive Ain’t Bad
As an English tutor, I spend a great deal of time with people who don’t like English; the irony of this is not lost on me, so don’t worry about it. :) What I learn from my students is, mostly, perspective. When you can’t get the right verb tense, that’s a major problem. When you [...]
February 01
Verbing
I have an adult student who has come to me for tutoring. Although his spoken English is excellent, his written English requires some work. He came to Canada recently, and just signed himself up for some courses at the local college. He’s taking, amongst other courses, Business Communication and Introduction to English Literature. We had [...]
January 18
Humans or Machines?
Where I live, it’s the end of the semester; post-secondary schools have just finished and the high-schools are just beginning final exams. Students are wired on caffeine, and going on little-to-no sleep. Those in their last year of a programme are moved to livid tears by the thought of not getting at least 95%. I [...]
November 23
Roget’s Thesaurus
I’ve gone on about this before, but I was writing something a couple of weeks ago and realised exactly how fiercely I cling to this book while writing. I did a few little experiments with my students, and have come to an absolute: one simply cannot write without a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus by one’s [...]
October 12
Weird Red Editing Marks
When your (utterly brilliant) paper is handed back to you, are you filled will trepidation? When you peek through your fingers to look at the paper, does it take you another half hour to understand what the professor or proofreader thought of it? Does it look like a bunch of aliens stepped in red ink [...]
September 14
Study Groups
This one is for the tutors. Only 24 hours in the day and only 7 days in the week, and you’re expected to tutor how many people?! One purpose of this blog is to show Writing Centre personnel how to “do more with less”. The short answer: let them teach themselves (a.k.a. “study groups”). For [...]
August 31
Floating with Just a Piece of Driftwood
When writing papers outside of the classroom, one is able to improve one’s writing through proofreading, use of spell-checkers, tutors, etc; one may have several people critique the paper; one may also take advantage of those “midnight flashes of brilliance”, where one wakes up in the middle of the night with the answer one has [...]
August 10
Learning By Example
Human beings learn best by example. We have the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do” because people tend to do what others do. If infants are not spoken to, they don’t learn to speak; if they don’t see people walking, they don’t learn to walk. The same deal goes for learning to [...]
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I'm Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins. Currently, I am the primary blog
writer. Please feel free to contribute writing tips and ideas by
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