About Sam:

Watching students attain their goals in writing because of something I have said or done as in the example above makes me feel I have made a difference in someone’s life. In the three years I have worked as a tutor, I have sought out these rewarding moments. Every day that I have sat down with students they have reminded me of why I plan to become an math teacher. The ability to use my own mathematical knowledge to help students indicates to me the major significance of what a graduate program in math will offer.

Beginning with the tutor-training seminar in my first year of tutoring, I discovered new insights into the math field. I developed an unwavering interest in the practice of tutoring through response to scholarly articles on writing theory, collaborative discussion, and actual practice. The work became impelling and the education invaluable.

This past summer I privately tutored English to a 15-year-old, and the summer before that I tutored a group of incoming freshmen in philosophy. Handling the transition of the middle school student into high school, I created an English curriculum of grammar and structure to prepare him for writing at the ninth grade level. Similarly, I taught logic to philosophy students so that they would be confident in critical reasoning at the college level. Together, the two experiences taught me about setting goals for students based upon planning a regimen of work.

In many ways, my abilities to tutor have been sharpened because I have concentrated on course work diligently. I have lived the writing process. In the fall of 1996, I wrote six non-fiction essays for an advanced composition class, exploring new ways of generating ideas, shaping my writing to meet readers’ needs and experimenting with alternatives to the traditional methods of organizing prose. Working in the writing center throughout the last three years of my undergraduate studies has always allowed me to work closely with writing theory as well as to be a reflective practitioner of writing instruction.

In that fall semester of ’96, I wrote an article called “Asking for Confidence” where I descriptively endorsed specific questions asking strategies based upon the practice I had developed in the writing center for encouraging student’s writing. I have chosen to include this article, which has been accepted for publication by The Writing Lab Newsletter, so that my message may be better understood. Writing this paper focused my own understanding of what confidence can do for students, namely, build them into better writers.

Now I wish to continue my education and experience with writing instruction by entering a Rhetoric and Composition program for a Master’s of Arts in English that will guide me toward my ultimate goal of teaching at the college level. The excellence I have maintained in undergraduate courses, my firm experience with multiple forms of tutorial instruction, including my three years of writing center work, and my desire to transfer that knowledge to others through presentation and publication necessitate my climb upwards. I have only begun to understand the community of academic and student writing which your composition program can offer. As a graduate student in your program, I know I will grow to be significant member in that community.