Students unwittingly tell all

Now that I have a few sessions under my belt, I have started to notice some patterns. Writers who are personally invested in what they have written never push their paper too far away from them. They never want the tutor to read their paper out loud. Heaven forbid -- we might say the wrong word or use the wrong inflection. When these writers read out loud, they savor certain words. They laugh at things they have written. They marvel at good sentences.

The rest of the writers hesitate if I ask them to read their paper out loud. They squirm. They push their papers as far away from themselves as they can. And they have much shorter attention spans than their happily absorbed counterparts. These students retreat to their happy places when a tutor takes over a session. They nod absently when a tutor asks them a direct question. They slouch. And they cannot sit still. These students make fidgeting an art.

I look for the pen first. Are they holding it? Have they set it down on the table? Has it become a newfound source of amusement for the student? Did they put it back into the cup on the table? If they do not have a pen in hand, I know I have been talking too much -- especially if I have a pen in my hand and the student has not said anything in the last five minutes.

Today when I tutored, I tried not to use a pen at all. I wrote down the information I needed for my log and then handed the pen over to the student. I'm going to tutor without a pen more often, because those students never leaned back in their chair. They never rolled their eyes. They didn't fidget. And they marked their papers more than I would have. These students self-corrected more often than any other students I have tutored so far. Amazing things happen when you listen, suggest, and allow the students to make the changes.

Sometimes I want to make the changes for the students. I am learning to curb these impulses. The first student I tutored today had boundless enthusiasm about the topic of his paper. His enthusiasm was reflected in an interesting way in his paper. He would get so excited, he couldn't stand to end his sentences yet. The result? Run-on after run-on after run-on. I mentioned these sentences and he willingly helped find a sentence as long as a boa constrictor and then he fixed it. I offered guidance when he asked for it, but he knew what to do.

I think many of them know what to do. All we need to do is place a pen in their hand and hide the one in ours. (I don't know if I could always tutor without a pen. It's hard!)

P.S. Is anyone else a compulsive leaf cruncher? Autumn has come and the trees around my house are starting to lose their leaves. I enjoy walking through big piles of leaves and hearing them crunch, but this is not the kind of compulsiveness I'm talking about. I'm talking about seeing a solitary leaf in the middle of the street and running out (sometimes checking for cars, sometimes not) just to jump on it. I will not walk in straight lines on my way home so I can crunch all of the individual leaves spread across the sidewalks and lawns. At this time every year, I have an inkling I look like a drunk playing hopscotch when I walk home.