'one size fits all' thesis

During a bad tutoring sessions, frustration is always accomponied by a feeling of helplessness. What happens is that something happens that I don’t want to happen, and yet there it is, happening all the same, and there I am, feeling impotent. The specifics of this sitution usually involve a student struggling with some aspect of a paper, and I am unable to bring any resolution to their struggle. Sometimes this is because I can’t place the problem and only see symtoms, and sometimes it comes from being unable to communicate the solution. One example in which both these took place happened recently. I was discussing the thesis of a studnets paper with him. The thesis was something like, “Macbeth’s wicked nature eventually led to his fall.” Much of the paper however was devoted to describing the role Macbeth’s wife played in Macbeth’s destruction. I recomended to him that he include this detail in his thesis. He refused to change it, arguing that his paper wasn’t about Macbeth’s wife, but about Macbeth. We debated the paper for a few more minutes, and it eventually dawned on my that the problem didn’t have to do specific content of this thesis, but rather was one of clarity. What his thesis was trying to say was that it was Macbeth’s greed that began the chain of events that would eventually lead to his destruction. He had used the ‘one size fits all’ strategy of a vague thesis. Eventually I understood this, and I was able to explain my confusion, giving him new advice, which he found much more agreeable, but in the meantime the whole thing was very frustrating. I thought I understood what he meant, that I knew the solution, and that the student was just being beligerant. The moral? Patience, or something like that. Or perhaps it is realizing that frustration is inevitable.