Okiedokie No Way

Honestly? I would rather tutor those “really bad” papers. I view the “okay” papers as a sort of trap—on the surface it looks like any other piece of ground that I’ve treaded before, but unless specific care is taken to inspect and tread carefully, I might end up getting sucked right into a quicksand pit leading to failure for me but also mainly for the tutee.

With papers that seem to be all right on the surface and only thirty minutes to read the thing, pound out the top three items of discussion, and then relay it to the tutee while including all of the tutee’s concerns, it is all too easy to miss the imminent looming problems that would make an “okay” paper and writer so much better. Then once the paper and its writer have left the Writing Center, rethinking the session often leads to better advice that could not possibly help the writer now unless the said writer returns for more—although if that doesn’t happen then perhaps the tutor will learn from her mistakes and might help another writer in the future.

After all, the “okay” papers are ones I don’t to often see passing my way. I get so used to seeing papers where the top problems are sentence structure or overall organization that when something that doesn’t have those problems slides along I get fooled into thinking that there’s nothing there to really work on. Fortunately, I think I’m learning how to overcome the foolishness, especially with the analysis of that okay paper in Friday’s class.

I mean, I’ll still probably see those pretty good papers come by and maybe hey, they’ll actually be pretty good without any largely problematic issues. And maybe they’ll be like that Friday’s class paper where on first quick read it seems to be okay, although on closer inspection without pressing time or a waiting line of next tutees, something that is sometimes rare in actual sessions, the whole paper caves in on itself in mainly failure with its bright ray of hope existing in the final sentence. With that, one of the best pieces of advice in dealing with these papers was the option to head directly to the end. I wouldn’t have thought of that! Yet when I heard it, it made perfect sense.

I’m going to admit that my mind is fairly trained to see mainly grammar and sentence structure problems, word choice and overall quick-fix organization. I guess I’m too used to seeing ESL—although I guess they are now LEAP—students in my sessions. It’s starting to make my tutoring sight focus on what I see with those papers in all my other sessions. In that respect I’m very glad for this prompt as well as the Friday class. Something like that should be obvious, but I don’t think I’ve ever consciously considered it! Oh well, I guess that’s what this class is for. I have to learn these fine tuning details somehow.