<p>OK, the thread on “how much do you help” got me thinking. I have never read or edited or helped on a college project. Easy to say, they never asked! Recently one of mine had a Spanish I project due. A relative is a native speaker and a Spanish teacher (not at the same school). Is it wrong to run it past her? Not to think up the original dialog, or to do the majority of the work, but to check before turning it in? Is this different that using the campus help group? Different than going to office hours? Different than if a relative speaks Spanish? We felt pretty awash in the ethics area… she finally read it aloud to the relative and got general but not precise help… Geez, it’s so hard to figure this out.</p>
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<p>Personally, I think that sounds perfect. Utilizing, but not abusing a good resource. </p>
<p>To draw a rough comparison, I worked in my college’s writing center. Our #1 rule was that we were not editors. We could talk about global issues and we could work on patterns of error, but we didn’t go through and point out every individual problem…doing so would’ve drawn attention away from bigger issues and blurred the line between our voices + the student’s own. If it turns out that your daughter struggles with some particulars, then it might make sense for her to sit down with her relative or a tutor and work on those (sample sentences, going over past assignments, book exercises, looking over a future assignment and paying special attention to the issue, etc). Until then, I think you chose a very appropriate level of involvement :)</p>
<p>I give my french essays to my friends. They just correct problems like tense mis-steps and when nouns don’t agree with the verb and grammatical stuff like that. I’ve always felt that that’s the equivalent of having someone read over an English essay for mechanical errors, and don’t consider it wrong.</p>