Reality TV in the WC

I tutored a pretty crazy session the other day—an older woman came in wanting help with her “moment that changed my life forever” paper. Before we got started she told me her paper was really long because once she got rolling with the writing she just couldn’t stop. Rather than one single incident, she figured she’d just throw in the life story. Her five page assignment had grown into a fifteen page narrative. No kidding.

As far as therapy sessions, this one was a whopper. Molested as a child, almost the victim of a smothering as a pre-teen, three husbands (in succession—no polyandry, although that probably would have fit right in), was cheated on, gave her children away, disowned by parents, lost the house, became homeless and wandered the streets of Ogden for years.

No, we’re not through.

Cut her foot, almost bled to death, developed severe infections, found God in a cardboard box, began mediating fights between drug lords, started writing poetry, healed miraculously, decided to come back to school and major in psychology. What could I say? I felt so jaded pointing out errors in punctuation or word usage, but I just didn’t have the time or energy to muster much beyond that. The sustained tone, emotional impact, and incredible length of this paper made the session seem endless. I needed air. I needed a walk. I needed Ding Dongs (4) and Pepsi.

Before she left I printed her a copy of John G. Magee Jr.’s poem “High Flight” which seemed appropriate given the poetry samples she had included in her paper. (See? I’m not completely heartless.) Incidentally, as I was traipsing around campus this week administering dev math surveys, I ran into her. We were both waiting for the same math class. Small talk seemed pointless after that life story. Awkward. So I’ve made a decision. We all have certain topics that we’d rather not tutor. I’ll take on the pregnancy and enema sessions, and y’all can have the catastrophic, novel-length life stories. What a deal.

Of Particular Interest

The mostly true story of Helvetica and the NYC subway system.

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.

Emotion doesn't exist..

Speaking of emotional sessions, I just had to tutor Turabian. I've done several papers in Turabian before, but this was a rough and tumble run-in that shattered my confidence in the citations and probably turned me into a liar. I told the poor history student where and when I was unsure of my answers, but the citation manual, google, and our combined knowledge proved inadequate in the face of some of his citations. It was not necessarily emotional for him, but I did have a couple of guilt spasms when he asked me questions. When he walked in he asked "does anyone know Turabian?" I thought I did. Apparently I don't.

Other than the religious diatribe paper I had last year, I have never had a paper offend me. Even then it was more incredulity then offense, though I did feel like I should be offended for all those non-mormons who pray.

I have had a few stressed out students, but I've found that a few sympathetic noises, a smile, and a stubborn unwillingness to focus on anything but the paper can subdue most emotional outbursts. I've never been threatened. I've never been stalked. I've never had anyone cry, or even be overly stressed. Maybe the writers just walk in, see me sitting at the table and decide I am not the best source for sympathy about how busy they are and how much they have to do. That's right. I probably browbeat all the emotional students out there into bottling up until they get a compassionate tutor.

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.

Give Some Praise

I have tutored some difficult topics, but I did not find myself offended. I tutored a paper today on homosexuality and it turned out to be a good conversation. The student had covered both sides of the issue well. The Obama and McCain papers did not offend me because the students did not really seem to know any of the issues. They mostly focused on the fact that they liked Obama because of his charisma or that they liked McCain because they were raised Republican. So, although these issues could have been emotionally charged, they did not turn out to be so because the students either knew too little to be offensive or knew enough not to be offensive.

I would say the most difficult sessions I have had stem from the attitudes of students and not what they have written. I had one student ask for help with creating a hanging indent in Word (she was sitting at a computer). She showed me the paragraph and I realized that she meant a block quote. As I began to show her what to do, she said, "Oh, just a minute." She then proceeded to read through the entire page and fix commas here and periods there. I stood there for a good five minutes before she allowed me to explain to her what she had originally asked. I felt irritated because of her attitude. She continued being irritating later when she sat down with another tutor. She spoke loudly and bragged about how she was a senior and did not really need help from anybody in the writing center. She then said that she planned on being published soon. On and on the bragging went. I could not figure out why she had even come in if she did not need our help. The other tutor dealt with her patiently, but my skin continued to crawl until she left.

I guess my difficult situations come with the personalities of other people. Their opinion on a topic does not make me bristle, but hearing them brag or having them act as if they do not need my help causes me some agitation. I have found the best way to deal with this (I am the one who needs to deal, not the student) is to praise that student wherever I can. This worked well with one student. When he came in, I asked if he needed a tutor. He said, "No! I just need somebody to look at my paper." In class we talked about this as a vocabulary problem, but for him it seemed to be a pride issue. He was declaring to me that he did not need to be tutored. This pride showed throughout the session, but as I let go of my own pride and began to find the good in his work, he loosened up and even smiled a little. I found my own bad feelings toward him dissipating. I even found myself agreeing with his former pompousness: he really did not need much help. So, I learned to make a friend instead of let somebody I hardly know ruin my day or bother my own pride. This is how I have learned to deal with seemingly difficult personalities. Giving them some praise can change my atittude and sometimes even theirs.

Difficult Sessions

What has been the most difficult session you've tutored so far?  Why?  How did you deal with it?

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.