I’m five weeks into the semester – and into being a tutor to students of English Studies. As you might recall, I was terribly nervous about this before the semester began. By now, I’m not that nervous anymore, but some of my doubts persist. In particular I’m having a bit of trouble with the time management of my tutorials, that is, figuring out how to fill the hour with meaningful content. So far, this has worked moderately okay-ish, depending on tutorial and topic.

One of the tutorials I’m giving is on Academic Writing and Research. This tutorial is basically a “how to write a term paper” class. Usually I have between 5 and 8 people who attend, some of which are actually already preparing for their BA thesis. I’m not quite as happy with this tutorial as I’d expected, which might be due to the ‘crowd’ I have there – so far, they have been absolutely unwilling to do partner or group work. It’s a bit of an icy atmosphere, which is probably my fault as this was my very first tutorial, I was very nervous and insecure and I didn’t really do much of an ice breaker here. So usually, the sessions in this tutorial consist of me giving out a task sheet and asking them to work on it, and then they give me individual feedback. At least they are all somewhat active, participating regularly. My worst nightmare was just being stared at for unbearable amounts of time, which so far hasn’t happened.

But I guess my problem with time management in this tutorial is probably due to the fact that the material I inherited for it is really scarce and unorganized. There wasn’t really a whole lot I could work with, so I more or less have to prepare every session from scratch. Also, I’ve never actually experienced this tutorial fully as a student myself. Though I took it during my undergraduate studies, I was in a group of three with a very nice and funny tutor who had a tendency to digress to telling stories about England rather than teaching. It was definitely interesting and very funny, but pretty useless as a tutorial for Academic Writing and Research… Anyway, I guess for me, this will be my trial semester and next semester I’ll know what to do better.

My other tutorial is one that accompanies the Introduction to Medieval English Studies which all students of English Studies are required to take in their first semester. So far, this tutorial has been more fun, as I also have a very good group of 10-14 somewhat enthusiastic students, most of whom participate very actively. The big advantage for this tutorial is also that there is tons of material, as there is a Reader to which the Introduction adheres. On top of that, I have a lot of task sheets and other material from previous tutors I can work with. Despite that, I almost always end up creating my own task sheets anyway (just because I’m a perfectionist, and I just can’t bring myself to hand out sheets printed in underlined Calibri text).

In this tutorial, the time management works slightly better – here, I tend to run out of time, rather than finishing ten minutes early and not knowing what to keep talking about. However, I still have a lot to figure out – for example, how much time is appropriate to assign to which types of tasks, and so on. Without those task sheets which I prepare every week, I think I’d be utterly lost. I’m just not really the type to just talk for an hour about a given topic. My mind doesn’t really work will in situations like that. It tends to work best when I’m alone and writing. I can write verbose essays about all these topics I’m trying to teach my students, but just talking about them… I’m lost. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to give an actual, self-planned seminar in my life, in which every session needs to fill 90 minutes. It seems incredibly difficult. Teaching is a lot harder than I thought, because I never thought that time management would be my biggest issue. But I guess it’s all a matter of experience.