It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

A Wednesday night, to be exact. In retrospect, it really wasn’t stormy, and daylight would last for at least another hour. Cameron and I were faithfully sentrying the writing center, and although the first hour was quiet, we jumped at every electric hiccup in the lights.

“So, you wanna take the first one?”

I was impressed by my co-sentry’s foresight. For some reason, the thought of actually tutoring someone hadn’t occurred to me.

“Sure. My last shift was pretty slow. No one came in, and we spent half the time talking about koalas.”

“Koalas?”

“You’d have to be there to understand.”

Time continued to drain, hiccup by hiccup, tick by tock. By the time the next hour had passed, Cameron and I had already discussed metaphysics, aesthetics, apologetics, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and several other disciplines canonized by contemporary scholars of philosophy. We still disagreed as to whether C-C-V was a legitimate phonotactics paradigm, but with fifty-eight minutes to nine o’clock, we had great hopes in reaching a resolution.

But then the light was blocked. Someone was in the doorway.

A tutee?

Spinning wildly on our computer chairs, we saw that the mysterious door-shadow was Claire, the writing center coordinator. She was making a friendly visit to ensure that we hadn’t lit anything on fire, and seeing that the writing center still had four walls and a ceiling, she soon left to take care of some other obligations.

Yet, twenty minutes later, the light was blocked again.

“Umm. Hi, is this the writing center?”

Great Strunk and White’s ghost! A real tutee! Bidding her welcome, scanning her wildcard, taking her information, I joined her at a table. My first session, I realized in excited horror, was about to begin.

“We certainly appreciate you dropping by. Could you tell me a little about your assignment?”

She produced her syllabus, and we read the professor’s expectations.

What happened next was a blur. When I returned to full consciousness, Cameron, Claire, and another SSC employee were staring at me, asking me to shut down my computer so they could go home. Yet, over the past couple days, I’ve had time to reflect on those forty minutes—which, I know, is double a normal session—and like an amnesia victim, attempt to reconstruct what happened.

I think the session began surprisingly well; a smile and a corny joke broke the ice, and the tutee seemed comfortable talking about her writing concerns. However, I think my biggest struggle was prioritizing. In our textbook, Macauley made planning for a session seem relatively simple, but considering how fast those minutes trickle away, prioritizing is, in reality, wickedly difficult. Setting a hierarchy of importance is only part of the challenge; even more difficult is deciding how much time to spend on each writing concern.

Perhaps the solutions to such quandaries will come only with experience. As Wingate says, every session is different, so tutors must learn how to adapt themselves quickly to circumstances. That ability to adapt, I suppose, will likewise come only with experience.

At the end of our time together, I asked the tutee what had helped her the most during the session. “Reading the syllabus,” she said. “I was really confused about this paper, but reading the syllabus actually answered most of my questions.”

I slapped my forehead. Hopefully, something in the other thirty-nine minutes had been helpful as well. In the dark and stormy nights to come, I am left to wonder how many writing concerns will be resolved by helping a tutee understand the assignment itself.