Dan it! I'm so frustrated!
My worst experience in the Writing Center… Hmm… That is kind of a hard prompt. Not that I have not had my far share of horrible tutoring sessions, but that is the reason it is hard. I have had a lot of pretty bad sessions. There has been nothing really crazy or over the top that I could rant on and on forever about. Mostly they have just been annoying and frustrating.
Just the other day had a tutee come in with a big stack of papers. Once we were settled I asked her what her assignment was. She told me that she had a bunch of questions that her professor had assigned her to go trough and answer each one. She was in a criminal justice class. There were ten pages of questions, and I was off in a half hour. Right off the bat I did not really know how to approach this session. I had never taken the class, and did not know the material. This was not a formal paper. From the teacher’s description of the assignment grammar did not matter. All she wanted was well thought out answers. The student was an ESL student, so I tried my best to help out with “grammar and stuff” to make her ideas more clear.
She was reading her answers to me and I was having I hard time understanding her. My lack of knowledge on the subject was not helping either. It started to get more frustrating when it started taken more than ten minutes per answer. I knew this session was going to never end. I pushed through. Then a question came up that I randomly knew the answer to. The student’s answer was incorrect. I did not know what to do. In the end I did not give her the answer for this many reasons: that is not my job, I am not the answer fairy, I am not a criminal justice tutor, and it just did not feel ok to me to fix it. I felt a little bad sending her away knowingly with a wrong answer. It did not take me that long to get over it. Also, she was wearing a large abundance of perfume. I could taste it. It was overwhelming. It hurt my throat and made it hard for me to talk. Frustrating.
Another one of my frustrating sessions was when I had a tutee that was in love with commas, yet she had no idea how to use them. It was like the example of someone who was taught to put a comma whenever you take a breath, and had a speech impediment. I could not even understand her paper it was so full of commas. I tried and tried to teach her comma rules, but it was not sinking in. It got to the point where I just had to tell her to go back and check everyone of her thousand commas and make sure they where correct. She also repeated her ideas so much. She was a really nice person, and I enjoyed talking with her. I just had a really frustrating time trying to comprehend and fix her paper.
Just the other day had a tutee come in with a big stack of papers. Once we were settled I asked her what her assignment was. She told me that she had a bunch of questions that her professor had assigned her to go trough and answer each one. She was in a criminal justice class. There were ten pages of questions, and I was off in a half hour. Right off the bat I did not really know how to approach this session. I had never taken the class, and did not know the material. This was not a formal paper. From the teacher’s description of the assignment grammar did not matter. All she wanted was well thought out answers. The student was an ESL student, so I tried my best to help out with “grammar and stuff” to make her ideas more clear.
She was reading her answers to me and I was having I hard time understanding her. My lack of knowledge on the subject was not helping either. It started to get more frustrating when it started taken more than ten minutes per answer. I knew this session was going to never end. I pushed through. Then a question came up that I randomly knew the answer to. The student’s answer was incorrect. I did not know what to do. In the end I did not give her the answer for this many reasons: that is not my job, I am not the answer fairy, I am not a criminal justice tutor, and it just did not feel ok to me to fix it. I felt a little bad sending her away knowingly with a wrong answer. It did not take me that long to get over it. Also, she was wearing a large abundance of perfume. I could taste it. It was overwhelming. It hurt my throat and made it hard for me to talk. Frustrating.
Another one of my frustrating sessions was when I had a tutee that was in love with commas, yet she had no idea how to use them. It was like the example of someone who was taught to put a comma whenever you take a breath, and had a speech impediment. I could not even understand her paper it was so full of commas. I tried and tried to teach her comma rules, but it was not sinking in. It got to the point where I just had to tell her to go back and check everyone of her thousand commas and make sure they where correct. She also repeated her ideas so much. She was a really nice person, and I enjoyed talking with her. I just had a really frustrating time trying to comprehend and fix her paper.
posted by Eric at 7:20 PM
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