Anyone Else Ready for the End?
So, there's not prompt, but I don't think it really matters. I want to write this while I had a moment, so I thought I would talk about a funny tutoring experience. For class today we're supposed to bring in our top ten emotionally charged sessions. Sadly, I don't think I have ever had an emotionally charged session. No one I have tutored has written about a subject that offended me, and most people I have tutored have not spilled out their feelings about some horrible experience.
But there have been a couple of sessions that have come close. One Saturday at Davis I had a line of people waiting to be tutored. I'm the only writing tutor on Saturdays so I was getting pretty drained, and all of the papers were about the same thing. They were all defining a word, or a concept. I had read papers defining the word crazy, and papers defining the word love, and papers defining the concept of drugs. (By the way the drug paper might have been my favorite.) One of the girls came and we began reading through her definition of the word crazy. She decided she would use a couple of examples to define this word, and one of those examples included a crazy ex-girlfriend. This "ex-girlfriend" had destroyed her ex-boyfriend's car by scratching the paint and dumping some kind of chemical all over it (I can't remember what) and then sat in the bushes and watched the boyfriend come out and discover it and start crying. I'm reading this with the girl thinking, "either this girl has a good imagination or this really happened." The whole thing sounded pretty angry and vengeful and I couldn't stop myself from asking her if this had happened to her, or she knew of someone that this had happened to. She glibly said she had done it to her ex-boyfriend and then moved on. At that point I wasn't sure what to say. I was sitting next to a girl who had the ability and the desire to destroy someone else's property for revenge. I made sure not to offend her in the session. We just talked about content and how to organize the paper and I sent her on her way. I wanted to ask her if she was defining the word crazy because it so closely defined how she viewed herself, but I steered away from that.
That same day I had a girl define the word love, I think, and at some point in the session she just started going off on her family. She started to explain how they look down on her for having a nose ring, but her cousin had a baby out of wedlock, and no one would talk about it, or say it was a bad thing. It was a big family secret. She just kept going on about this, even though there wasn't really anything in her paper about family, or about a specific incident with her family. I just listened and then tried to direct her back to her paper so we could finish the session. I didn't want to seem unsympathetic, but there were two more people waiting after her!
I'm just glad these were the most emotionally charged sessions I have tutored.
But there have been a couple of sessions that have come close. One Saturday at Davis I had a line of people waiting to be tutored. I'm the only writing tutor on Saturdays so I was getting pretty drained, and all of the papers were about the same thing. They were all defining a word, or a concept. I had read papers defining the word crazy, and papers defining the word love, and papers defining the concept of drugs. (By the way the drug paper might have been my favorite.) One of the girls came and we began reading through her definition of the word crazy. She decided she would use a couple of examples to define this word, and one of those examples included a crazy ex-girlfriend. This "ex-girlfriend" had destroyed her ex-boyfriend's car by scratching the paint and dumping some kind of chemical all over it (I can't remember what) and then sat in the bushes and watched the boyfriend come out and discover it and start crying. I'm reading this with the girl thinking, "either this girl has a good imagination or this really happened." The whole thing sounded pretty angry and vengeful and I couldn't stop myself from asking her if this had happened to her, or she knew of someone that this had happened to. She glibly said she had done it to her ex-boyfriend and then moved on. At that point I wasn't sure what to say. I was sitting next to a girl who had the ability and the desire to destroy someone else's property for revenge. I made sure not to offend her in the session. We just talked about content and how to organize the paper and I sent her on her way. I wanted to ask her if she was defining the word crazy because it so closely defined how she viewed herself, but I steered away from that.
That same day I had a girl define the word love, I think, and at some point in the session she just started going off on her family. She started to explain how they look down on her for having a nose ring, but her cousin had a baby out of wedlock, and no one would talk about it, or say it was a bad thing. It was a big family secret. She just kept going on about this, even though there wasn't really anything in her paper about family, or about a specific incident with her family. I just listened and then tried to direct her back to her paper so we could finish the session. I didn't want to seem unsympathetic, but there were two more people waiting after her!
I'm just glad these were the most emotionally charged sessions I have tutored.
posted by Tamar at 8:40 AM
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