Be afraid

Well I would tell the incoming tutors to be afraid, be very afraid. I love being a writing tutor and I enjoyed this class-not the essay. I think that students should first just realize that being a tutor takes so much work. That’s what I wish I would have realized.

I felt so behind this whole semester because I had such a busy school schedule that I was rarely in the writing center. I missed orientation because I had SI orientation. I was never able to go to the meetings because I have a class at 2:00. And, if the meetings continue at this time, I still won’t be able to go because this class is every semester and it’s required for my major. Nonetheless, I felt very behind and left out because I never went to the meetings.

Another thing is that I only worked twice a week. I was actually only going to work one day a week until Claire asked me if I could work an for an hour on Thursday mornings. With how limited my schedule was and how many tutors there are, Claire could only put me in once a week. I thought since I was a beginning tutor that this would be fine, but it wasn’t. I didn’t get enough instruction while I was there, and when I did, I would forget it by next week.

So the first thing I would recommend to writing tutors is that they need time to learn and do this job. I had some time, but apparently it wasn’t enough.

The second thing I would recommend is to not wait for your bibliographic essay. I believe every single tutor who procrastinated will tell you this. If there is a tutor out there who doesn’t tell you this- either they are efficient with their homework and time, or they are crazy.

Lastly, I was never able to explain myself well. I have difficultly expressing myself in words, but on paper, I can sound okay. I was really worried that I wasn’t going to be able to help anyone because of that, but it’s really no big deal. The beginning is scary, but I fell into the swing of things. The writing center becomes your turf, so you become more relaxed. I still had situations where I could not explain myself very clearly, and it can be embarrassing. But, I just told myself that I don’t know everything, and I won’t always be able to help every problem.

Another scary aspect is “what if the tutee doesn’t feel like they got help?” Well it isn’t that big of a deal. Ya, it totally sucks to feel like someone went away disappointed in your work, but you come to realize that you know how to do your job. And if you did it well, then the tutee probably just didn’t know how the writing center worked and they thought they didn’t get help when they really did.

Lastly, tutoring takes a lot of patience and not just with the students. It takes patience to learn the ins and outs of the center, and there are experienced tutors who still make mistakes, but it’s okay. The owls take patience I promise you will get stupid requests and horrible essays that you won’t want to respond to. The same happens with the students who come in, but for some reason, online submissions are just much worse. You might get requests like “Is my paper grammar free?” and you will want to e-mail a brick to that student. But tutoring takes patience.