Touchy Feely

Answering the question, “where do we draw the line?” is as hard to do as defining what the line is in the first place. The line is something you feel more than you explain. Someone who has been there and experienced the line will know what you are talking about when you talk about it, but those that have not been there will have a hard time understanding what you mean when you refer to the line until they experience it themselves. The knowing only comes with the experience. The same goes for where we draw the line, the knowledge comes with experience. We can probably set up some basic guidelines such as time limits, but each student has different needs that require us to give some more time and some less time accordingly. I believe that a good tutor learns more about how to be a good tutor each time he or she tutors. The more that we experience crossing the line, or experience the feeling of getting close to crossing the line, the more adept we will become at knowing where the line needs to be drawn.
I think our instructors knew this when they threw us to the sharks (or so it felt when they sent us on our first tutoring session). We where waiting for further instruction on what we were to do, and instead they said that it was okay that we knew nothing because after tutoring a few times we would be experts. Perhaps we are not yet true experts, but without previous discussion we quickly learned what the line was enough from pure experience to be able to recognize immediately the line concept when it was discussed in class.
I know it sounds touchy, feely, girly, and as Ammon pointed out,” Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.” but in my mind I compare feeling the line to when I learned to drive a car with a stick shift. I kept asking how to do it and every one kept giving what I thought was kind of a pansy answer, they said, “You just feel it.” I didn’t understand until I tried and grinded gears, stalled, grinded gears, and stalled again. After a while I could just feel when I had given too much clutch or not enough. The same goes with tutoring, after experience you can start to feel when you are giving too much instruction or not enough. You recognize when the paper is too much yours and not enough theirs. After you feel it enough you will then start to feel when it is time to draw that line.
That is it. That is my theory. Do not bother looking for it in any upcoming writing journals because Dr. Amsel would probably not approve of my hypothesis since I lack concrete data and so forth. (I loved his lecture on logic by the way)

Adios!