Horrid Paper...

This week’s blog is being written in Spokane Washington. I decided on a random whim yesterday, with nothing else to do, to make the exciting ten hour drive to visit a friend I have not seen in awhile. Leaving at four in the afternoon got me here at two in the morning. It was a wonderfully therapeutic drive, beautiful mountains and scenery. And now I can not wait to get out and have some fun Washington adventures!

Anyways back to the topic…

Last spring semester when I was working as an appointment math tutor I had a tutee come to me with a problem. He had taken a paper he had written to the writing center as was part of the assignment. The tutor who helped him was not very graceful in letting him not that his paper was a piece of garbage. She told him it was horrid and that he needed to not only rewrite the whole thing, but to also come up with a new topic. His paper was very anti-religion and anti-government. The topic offended the tutor and she let him know that. She refused to help him with it because of the topic and bad construction. Needless to say my tutee was pretty furious with the writing center.

This is definitely an example of what not to do.

After he told me this I read his paper. It was a horrid piece of garbage honestly. I did not tell him this though. The topic greatly offended me. The paper had every imaginable problem. It had no thesis, ranting about this and that. The main problem was it was extremely choppy. He bounced around ideas like a beach ball at a Nickelback concert. I tried to point out some positives in his paper, although I can not remember what they were. I then got over the irritation the topic caused me and tried to help him as much as I could with grammar, syntax, and organization. I gave him some pointers on how to better construct the paper. I did not give him false hope that the paper was good, I told him it needed work, but that he was going to be able to fix it. He left in a lot better mood, inspired to fix his paper, but with no intent to ever step foot in the writing center again.

What a horrible experience for the student. It did not need to be like that. All it took from me to motivate him was a little help, a positive attitude, and letting him know he could do it. It was not hard for me to overcome the topic, while uncomfortable and totally not agreeing with him at times, they were his opinions and I saw no reason to badger him about changing his beliefs when what he came to me for was a little grammatical advice.

I will use this experience to help myself be a better tutor, using a positive attitude no matter the circumstances. Hopefully I will never cause a student to have that bad of an experience in the writing center.