The College Mentoring Project

Saturday was the second and final meeting with the college mentoring program. Myself and Emily worked with Alex, who was writing her "letter" to her cousin. Emily and I brought the paper outside in the beautiful weather to read over, and as I read it I was thinking that Alex had some great ideas and did a great job of picking a central point (that Americans are intimidated of the growing Hispanic population) and sticking to it.

We brought Alex back outside in the sun and talked to her about her paper. Alex said that last time she worked a lot on organization, which was apparent in her paper because it was very well organized. Then, we got to the discussion of quotes. I noticed that the students were told to use quotes from the articles in their paper, but Alex hadn't done that. Alex admitted to working on quoting in the last session, but she still hadn't incorporated them into her paper. Alex was not confident in her ability to quote effectively or "correctly". The approach we took to the situation had a few elements: 1. We asked Alex to pick a quote in the article that she might want to use (for hypothetical purposes) 2. We asked her what argument it supported 3. We asked her "why??" Why did she choose that quote in particular? How does it support her claim? 4. We showed Alex how to introduce and follow up her quotes using the "sandwich" idea, that a quote should never stand alone.

Following the session, we had a discussion with the students about the differences between high school and college. Prior to this discussion, and even during my session with Alex, I never realized that quoting is a very foreign idea to high school students. I been thinking a lot about quoting and different ideas that are new to college students when they first step on campus. It's interesting to bring myself back to my first few weeks of college classes and remember what I found difficult. More importantly , this has gotten me to think of how to fix these issues and advise people on how to write better.