The black puma

The full moon waxes strong as i fly through the night. Pedal. Its three A.M., the witching hour, and the night is particularly cool. Pedal. As ride past a very casual looking older home I notice that there is something very different tonight. Every light is on in the house, and all these lights are a deep crimson red. I know not why these eerie lights are on, but I suspect Satanism. Pedal, pedal, pedal. A few miles down the rode, I hear a growling in the bushes. Frantically pedal, pedal, pedal...Fear is real, and has a purpose.

When I was hired on at the writing center, I was extraordinarily confident about my tutoring abilities. I thought, "It's easy, I write well, and I will be able to tutor kids on their writing." This was my attitude until the second day when Clair started training me. All the sudden there were, actually, things I didn't know, and I had to teach people them. Ahh!
My normally high confidence was dashed as my first actual tutoring session drew closer.

Despite all the wonderful training I received prior to this, I couldn't help but question myself. My mind churned as I thought, " I don't know the slightest thing about writing. I simply wrote, went into the writing center, had Chris help me, and then revised. “I kept questioning my own abilities. As this questioning continued the fear grew. I kept telling myself, "If Clair trusts me, I trust me." I began to get anxious and came to the point where I decided that it was better to get it over with than to live in this nervous state.

Then she appeared. With a sweet smile she handed me the hardest paper of my total tutoring experience. It was a mess! It was a ten page research paper which was due the next day, and she didn't have any sources! Worst yet, I couldn't figure out what it was about. I did my best and sent the girl with the sweet smile on her way to the slaughter.
She left and a great knot in my stomach grew. I thought that that girl's paper was completely ruined and I had helped in her train wreck. I wanted to call her and make sure she was working on it.

After thatanother student came in with the most illogical I have seen in my tenure as a tutor. The paper's body argued completely against his thesis. I tried to persuade him to either change the thesis, or work on the body, yet he didn't listen to me at all! It turned into an argument about how to fix his paper. This incident is admittedly not one of my finer moments, but to my surprise he walked out and thanked me for the help I had given him.

At this point I had been up for nearly twenty four hours, had a full day of classes, and been beaten down by these brutal essays. I went home in an exhausted haze of self pity to sleep, and then the next mourning something miraculous happened, the sun came up!

As a matter of fact the girl with the sweet smile came in and thanked me for helping her with her paper. Perhaps I had done something 'write'. (Bad joke, but it made me laugh). The fear that I experienced prior to these tutoring sessions helped me to prepare for them. This fear was, as twisted sister called it, "Being under the blade." The fear of the unknown helped me to become a better tutor, and survive the ravages of the South Weber Satanists.