College Mentoring Part 2

So last Saturday, we worked with the high school students involved in the college mentoring program. This time, I did not work with the same student as I did the first time around. I worked with a male student whom I will refer to as Fred for the purposes of this blog. When we first got there, Long and I had already sat down with our first student from the first session, but then I was assigned to work with Fred which I thought would be better because it would just be nice to have a one-on-one session. Fred and I first got acquainted with each other--I asked him his name and introduced myself. We then talked about the mentoring program for a little bit and the colleges he was looking to apply, one of them being MIT. I then asked him about his essay, which he wrote on why MIT would be a great fit for him. I read the essay over and just made some initial or little corrections on it. Then, I talked to Fred about the strengths of the essay and what I thought he could improve on. As I talked to Fred about some of the improvements he could make with his essay, his shyness in the beginning turned into a defensive mode. He tried to make excuses for everything I pointed out, and at first, I thought he just wanted to let me understand why he made or wrote something. However, after his fifth excuse for the fifth point I made, I realized that Fred was getting really defensive about his paper, not in a negative or belligerent way, but in a sort of "I don't want you to think I'm stupid" way. So my question, then, is this: how do you help students make improvements in their writing without the student feeling as if you, the consultant, are trying to say he/she is stupid or not so smart?