Bloggin' the Line

October 9, 2004 blog—

I want to set up a blog for my family. We’re so scattered. Maybe we’d be a little more in touch with each other’s lives if we could just go in and write. I don’t know if they’ll go for it. If I ever get a minute (see the problem?), I’ll write and ask everyone.
What is this now, my sixth week of tutoring? It’s funny—people come into the writing center and think I actually know what I’m doing. I guess, compared to them, I do. I’m getting comfortable. I’m practicing leaving my pen on the table, or, even better, picking it up and putting it into the tutee’s hand. If I can get them to make one note, they make the second one on their own. It takes a great deal of self-restraint, a trait for which I am in no danger of becoming famous, but it’s gratifying to watch tutees own their own papers, and giving the pen to them seems to make it clear that I’m not going to do it for them.
I try to keep in mind the things I’m reading and apply them to my job. I’m serious about this and I feel like a complete nerd for being serious about this. This is a valuable opportunity for me. We’re learning teaching methods in the one-on-one tutoring classes that I’m not being taught (yet?) in Elementary Ed. It’s affecting my writing, too. I’m being careful again. I notice things I didn’t notice before. I caught myself pointing out to a guy today the “voice” his professor is expecting to hear, based on the type of paper he’s writing, and I knew I wouldn’t have even been aware of it a month ago.
I have nothing to say. I’m just muttering along, waiting for my Melatonin to catch up with me so I can go to bed. Those darn pesky tutees kept expecting me to do my job today. I didn’t get any homework done. So, I’ve got the usual big weekend plans. Later days, we be bloggin,’ keep the blog, blog in there, and all that blog. Eats, Shoots and Leaves is great, by the way. I’m not a nerd! I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!

Cross to Help? & Peer Evaluation Sheets

Crossing the line eh? This week has been somewhat frustrating for me. After six hours of sitting in a writing lab, I don’t have a minute of tutoring time. At least I haven’t crossed the line. The majority of my tutoring time, as I think I have stated in past bloggs, has been spent with ESL students fixing grammar. I do not think crossing the line was too much of an issue in these sessions. However, I have been involved in a few sessions where crossing the line could have easily become an issue.
Luckily in one of the sessions, although something was obviously wrong with the paper, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. So I was left to asking questions the whole time while the writer made marks on her paper. I’m not sure how much that helped or even if it made her writing or paper better, but again, at least I didn’t cross the line. This experience makes me think about the part in the chapter when she says that tutors need to push themselves and find where the line is. If this doesn’t happen, in many cases, the tutor may not be effective. Is it better to cross the line than to not help your tutee? I don’t know.
I really enjoyed reading Ammon’s blog. His suggestions to keep from crossing the line were very helpful. I like the Idea of having your own personal back up map for when the writer does not have anything specific he wants to work on.
One thing that has been helpful in my beginnings as a tutor is to simply follow the peer evaluations sheets that many of the 1010 students bring us. This isn’t foolproof, and sometimes may not be the best approach to help a writer improve, but for the most part it helps me stay in bounds when evaluating a paper.
I also just read the chapter about tutoring in emotionally charged sessions and think it applies a lot to crossing the line. The last student I tutored had written a paper on how a personal experience had changed her life. She wrote about how her dad ran out of the family when she was young. If it had not been for the peer evaluation sheet she was required to have me fill out, I could have crossed the line somewhere or even made the session more emotional than it had to be. To some, these peer evaluation sheets may seem elementary but I think they help both the tutor and tutee immensely.

Warning Signs

I found the essay about walking the line extremely interesting, but even before I read it I knew that I had been doing too much for my tutees. Since reading the essay I have created some mental warnings in my head to help me stay on my side of the line.

Whenever I meet with a tutee I always find out the necessary information about their paper. I then have them read their paper to me. However, I do not just say, “read this out loud;” I give them specific things to watch for while they are reading. That way as soon as they start to read, they can be helping in the reviewing process. I have found that they find many of the mistakes that they have made. Before they start reading, I tell them what we will do after they have finished reading. If they don’t have anything specific that they want to look at, I simply tell them that we will look at the things I have marked while they were reading and that we will make sure their thesis and conclusion are effective. This is my basic outline for every session. Because I know pretty much exactly what I will be doing during the session I am less likely to cross any lines.

Another warning sign that I watch for is when I begin to suggest options to clarify a sentence and they simply jot down what I have said word for word. I am instantly reminded of the need to teach them how to write clear sentences, or at the very least ask them why my suggestion is clearer that what they had originally written.

Just yesterday I realized another warning sign. I have no problem writing on tutee’s papers as long as they are writing too. However I when a tutee took her pen and put the cap back on I was instantly reminded to write less and to help her write more.

Over all I think that as I begin to correct these problems with playing with the line, more warning signs will present themselves. I think that if we are constantly noticing these signs then we will protect ourselves from crossing the tutoring line and therefore, we will improve our ability to teach our tutees.

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!

I walk the line.

As I read, I realized that I have approached the line in a few tutoring sessions. I have a tendency to offer too many suggestions when my silence would best serve the tutee. In the short run, everyone is happier when I hand out answers, but it's not actually helping anything. I need to be careful not to let me desire to be helpful outweigh my duties as a tutor.

I can remember a specific instance early in my tutoring career (that is, for whole weeks ago), when I committed the sin of overempathising. A student was working on several projects at once, including an outline for a speech. The student mentioned several times that she was taking over twenty credit hours and was unable to keep up with the demands of her classes. I tried to offer her sympathy, but ended up spending fifteen minutes listening to her ramble. Though I'm sure she felt a little better, her homework had not gotten any easier or more complete.

There is only one other time when I can remember stepping on the line. An extremely uninterested FYE student asked me to read through her paper and sign it, even though she made it clear that she "never really had any problems with writing." This would have been fine if it had been true, but unfortunately it was not. Her paper was decent on the local level, but plagued with global problems. There was rambling, excessive repetition, and an overall lack of cohesiveness. I tried to point these things out, but she reminded me that she had only come in for help with grammar. Refusing to take no for an answer, I offered unwanted advice until the poor girl's eyes glazed over. She stopped being snotty and started to ignore me all together.

The problem is that the line is fluid. It was probably necessary for the first tutee I mentioned to blow off some steam before getting to work, but how much time should be allowed for that? The second tutee had some problems that I thought needed to be resolved, but she didn't. Who wins? Sometimes the only way to resolve situations like these is to push the limits until the tutee starts to push back. Tutors must find a balance between what they have to offer and what students will accept. I think (and hope) it will get easier to determine where the line is as I tutor more. Now that I have the concept of an all important line in the back of my mind, I will be better able to recognize and avoid it.

"The Line"

We talked about "crossing the line" this Monday. I'd like to see you talk about your experiences with this concept in your tutoring sessions and how you keep yourself in check. How do we know where, specifically, that line is?

If this doesn’t make sense, sorry

When I think of all the different things that can affect the writing process of a student, my mind begins to spin. The idea that students are placed in the position of writing as professionals with the limited knowledge they have, intrigues me in two ways. First I think that it can help the student to an extent because it requires them to learn something and stretch their minds. At the same time it doesn’t really help them to become a better writer. I find myself agreeing with Ammon’s idea of teaching students in a younger setting the things we have been discussing. I think that requiring a student to contemplate how they write will in turn make them a better writer.
I have sat by and allowed myself to write to please the teacher instead of writing to simply write. This has caused me to become numb to the power of learning, how sweet it tastes, and the ability to grow. Every time I finish a tutoring session I am left with a feeling of pity for the student, most of them are missing that experience. I want to help the students do better. But teaching someone to write, from what sometimes seems like scratch, is a stunt worthy of super hero stature. I have had numerous experiences with students in which I could easily spend hours with them. Whether or not this would help the student is a matter for another blog. The point is that I feel like I need to go back to the beginning with these students and read them bedtime stories. Where do you start with a students that brings a paper in that has not one coherent thought weaved into its pages? I often find students afraid to write because they don’t want anyone to read it and think they are incompetent. In this situation I just ask the student to write. Write what they know or what they don’t know. (Teachers do it why can’t I?) I don’t think that we can waste an opportunity to turn some students on to the experience of learning. We have these opportunities all the time. We aren’t really working with colligate geniuses here. What we are supposed to be is a place that harbors independent learning. My suggestion is that some students have not been taught to learn. What is it? How do we teach it? I really have no idea. All I know is that most of us have hit that wall when we realize that we have to actually try in collage. It has to take priority in many of our daily activities. (No more afternoon cartoons Layne.) Its time to buckle down and live up to what we are supposed to be! Students here at WeberState are learning that later than they should be. Lets speed up that process. Lets make life hard. Lets not just do their homework for them; we have an opportunity to inspire them to learn. Lets take it.