Is Slouching So Bad?

I despise rude people. All of them should be locked away and forced to listen to torturous hours of Mrs. Manners' columns (or is it Mrs. Manners's columns? Hmmm.) until they finally agree to be polite to the rest of the world.

An interesting fact about rude people that I learned recently: they thrive on making people be rude to them in return. If a rude person can make you be rude back, then they have won. It's a competition to them. "If I don't break them and they keep their cool, they win," a rude person thinks. "But if they lose it, then I win."

I hate to admit it, but I have a couple of friends who think like this. (I'm not talking about anybody in this class, so stop wondering if I'm referring to you. I'm not.) These are the people you do not want to "minimalist tutor." Because if they make a tutor stoop to their level, they think they have won.

To use a sports analogy: the best offense is a good defense. (Take note of this moment in history because the likelihood of a sports analogy appearing in any of the rest of my blogs is very slim.) If the student delights in being rude, be so perky that they want to cause you bodily harm. Once you slouch, you have admitted defeat. Once you stop talking so much, they begin to assume you are not doing your job. Once you set your pen down, that rude student has vowed never to enter the writing center again because we as tutors are incompetent and we are apathetic and we are rude. It's not that minimalist tutoring never works. It just doesn't work well with rude people.

An old high school friend sat by me at church today. Since we are old friends and he already knows my personality, I figured I could experiment on him. He did not sit straight for any of the meetings we attended together and I felt as though I was continually looking down my nose at him when we spoke. It made me feel snobby.

So I slouched.

And he smiled.

And all of a sudden, I stopped feeling like a snob.

Minimalist tutoring is a tricky technique because it is similar to another practice all of us hate: mimicry. The object of mimicry is to portray its victim by means of a distorted reflection. Mimicry is specifically designed to magnify the traits of some hapless person so the mimickers can feel as though they are better than their victims. Minimalist tutoring is designed to do the opposite: to set aside the magnifying glass and to understand the student a little bit better.

After all, students don't always back off and slouch because they're rude. Some of them are discouraged. Some of them are confused. Some of them are stuck. You never know -- these people may actually smile when you back off.