My baby

Definitely the session I brought up in class. One of his sentences argued against his thesis statement, but he thought he had it right. His definition of one of the words was not the correct definition, but that is how he understood it. I could not convince him otherwise. I could tell by the way he reacted when we corrected the most minimal typos that he was extremely attached to his paper. It's weird because at the beginning of the session he told me that he didn't think the paper was very good. However, that paper was still his baby none the less.

I think the people that are coming to the writing center for the first time will be more likely to react that way. You have to grow a tough skin in order to get better. As a tutor I think I can help them not to react that way. If we start out really positively and are able to give our criticism in a positive way, it can prevent a lot of the "why are you hurting my baby?" type reactions. The student that I referred to earlier may not have gotten so upset if I were more positive earlier on. It becomes hard to do so when the paper is really bad, but being positive is a necessary tutoring skill.

Even if the tutor is positive and doing everything perfect, the session can still become very emotional. I have only really had the one student that started to get upset with me, and not really anybody else. To my knowledge no one has tried to get me fired yet, so I can't be doing that poorly. I'm sure if I work there long enough though, that someone eventually will try to get me terminated.