One-Sided Conversations

Interestingly, I have not had an emotionally charged session yet that I have had to deal with. I assume this is a good thing, since I have not had my life threatened at any point during a tutoring session so far even though, apparently, this can happen to tutors at some point during their tutoring career. I have had a few minor difficult sessions, but these have actually been the opposite of emotionally charged. One boy came in within my first few weeks on the job, and after explaining his assignment topic to me, abruptly shut down, deciding to not respond to my advice or questions. He never tried to correct or contradict my statements; in fact, he mainly just nodded when I pointed out a mistake or suggested that he work on a sentence. This was frustrating in a different way than an emotionally charged session would be. Instead of having to fight with the student on everything said, I was forced to try to keep the student interested in anything I had to say, practically begging him to at least think something about my comments. Unfortunately, he had been made to go into the writing center due to a teacher requirement, confirming my belief that teacher-required writing center attendance is not the most effective way to engage students in the writing process.
Another session that I had was with a very dynamic woman who I had tutored a couple of times before. She generally wrote papers about music and because of this, felt as if it were her duty to explain the intricacies of musical symbols and rhythms to me in order for me to effectively help her. Although this was not necessary for me to fix the faulty sentences in her paper, often I noticed that after she thought out loud about the true meanings of the musical terms in her paper, she would develop better ideas. One particular day, however, the writing center was uncharacteristically busy when she came in for help during my shift. When she sat down, she explained that she hadn’t yet begun the paper, but she needed help in formulating an outline and thinking about the organization. After bouncing ideas back and forth with her, I was pretty happy with the rough sketch that we had set forth for her to start on. Right when I was prepared to turn her loose to start on her essay, she brought up that she had a term paper that was due in a couple of weeks that she wanted to talk about as well. After looking around the center, and seeing that every student was currently being accounted for, I reluctantly agreed, assuming that we could briefly discuss her ideas and set up an appointment for her to come back later. As the session progressed and more students began to trickle in, I found myself caught up in a one-sided conversation about how much better she felt when she spilled her ideas out to me as well as a lecture on the history of Scottish bagpipes (the apparent topic of her term paper). Eventually, I was able to allow her to go type her essay and move on to somebody else, but it was very difficult for me to politely inform her of the need for me to be available for somebody else. I guess that this was somewhat of an emotional session since she apparently felt the need to just simply talk to somebody, but it was very hard to push away a woman who seemed to be the opposite of aggressive or annoyed. Apparently, over friendliness can be just as dangerous in a tutoring session as can anger or grief.