Thursday, October 22, 2009

Pardon me, I can't be BOTHERED to read this paper for myself.

I’ve had several session in the past where either or I or the tutee has gotten a little frustrated or a little miffed, but none too bad. We were always able to work it out and move past our disagreement. That is, with all but one session…The tutee walked in and I asked him how he was doing. He said he was fine and that he was required to bring his paper in to get it tutored (big red flag went up in the back of my mind right then). He plopped his paper in front of me and proceeded to lay back in the seat and stare at me with a, “Well, get started!” look. I wasn’t about to begin playing that game (even though I hadn’t learned about the defensive minimalism or whatever it was that helps to deal with slightly antagonistic students), so I started asking him questions about his assignment. I asked him what subject he was writing about, and I received a vague “I don’t know really” answer. I asked him if he had his assignment sheet or what the assignment was, he didn’t have the sheet and he said he hadn’t really been paying attention when his teacher described it. He just knew that he was supposed to write a paper.
I tried to stop the inward groans as I said, “Okay, well, let’s just start. Would you like to read it out loud or should I?” He waved the paper toward me, and as I started reading out loud he promptly stopped paying attention to me and let his gaze wander around the room. In the second sentence I encountered a problem and tried to explain it to him, after I got his attention again, and he just nodded, said, “Okay,” and went back to staring around the room. With each explanation I gave, he seemed less interested, and even when I tried to comment on pieces I liked he would give me another sarcastic look or smug smile that simply infuriated me. I tried asking him more questions about what he meant and gave him simpler explanations of concepts he kept missing, and he seemed to be slowly falling asleep in his chair. When I was about a page from the end, I finally gave up and said that there would probably be the same problems throughout the rest of the paper and that he should take a look at them himself. I then gave him the paper saying I’d looked at his paper, and he darted out of the Writing Center. It took me at least 20 minutes to calm down after that. Luckily I didn’t have another session within that time period so I didn’t have the opportunity to lash out at anyone accidentally, but I was really ticked.
Of course, as the session went on I probably wasn’t the most pleasant of people to talk or listen to, but I still prickled that he’d not shown any interest or respect for the effort I was putting in to reading and explaining his paper. Most likely it was more effort than he’d spent in actually writing the darn thing. Also, if my spidey sense is correct, he more than likely did not do well on that paper anyway.

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