A Very Bad Session
For the most part my tutoring sessions have been productive, informative and usually quite enjoyable. However, this excludes one that is simply the worst tutoring session I have ever been a part of. This session was all wrong from the very beginning. The student had arrived thirty-five minutes late, and unfortunately for me we were not busy enough to turn him away. So with an unapologetic air, he whips his paper out of his backpack along with the assignment sheet and slides it across the table to me. I ask him what the assignment is, and he says "it is the paper right in front of you." I then calmly ask if he has any questions, but his reply is “I just have to get this paper read by a tutor as part of my assignment.” By this time I am starting to fume! He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t get what tutoring is about. He has no respect for me. The only thing he is here for is my signature or a tutoring code!
My next thought was to get this over with as quickly and pain-free as possible, so I start reading the paper. The purpose of the assignment (which I was forced to decipher from the assignment sheet) was to write about and analyze an article that discussed how eating preferences define or contribute to who we are as humans. Instead of doing this, he decided to turn this assignment into an opinion essay stating his views about why eating meat is so great, and why an omnivorous lifestyle is the best and only option. He hadn’t followed the assignment at all, but at this point how could I explain this to him?
Honesty and bluntness was the best and only solution, so I told him that he hadn’t followed the assignment. While I did point out that he had made some good points that could be used to support the author’s argument, he pretty much needed to reorganize and rethink the whole assignment. Needless to say he didn’t like my response. He proceeded to argue with my assessment of his assignment and then tried to point out how I was wrong. I tried giving him ideas on how to incorporate his ideas into a new, more complete essay, but he wouldn’t listen to anything I was saying. As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, he then started to argue with me about whether or not “cookbook” is one or two words. After proving my point by looking “cookbook” up in the dictionary and seeing that it was in fact one word, he still wanted to argue that the pronunciation or syllable dot in between cook and book meant that it is supposed to be written in two words.
By this point I had pretty much had all I could take. I told him to spell cookbook however he wanted and to leave his paper the way it was if he wanted to. I guess this response finally grabbed his attention. Now that he was finally listening to what I was saying, he asked me how he should write and word his paper to meet the assignment. I wasn’t going to waste my time explaining myself for a second time, so I told him to do it however you want I have already given you all of my suggestions.
My next thought was to get this over with as quickly and pain-free as possible, so I start reading the paper. The purpose of the assignment (which I was forced to decipher from the assignment sheet) was to write about and analyze an article that discussed how eating preferences define or contribute to who we are as humans. Instead of doing this, he decided to turn this assignment into an opinion essay stating his views about why eating meat is so great, and why an omnivorous lifestyle is the best and only option. He hadn’t followed the assignment at all, but at this point how could I explain this to him?
Honesty and bluntness was the best and only solution, so I told him that he hadn’t followed the assignment. While I did point out that he had made some good points that could be used to support the author’s argument, he pretty much needed to reorganize and rethink the whole assignment. Needless to say he didn’t like my response. He proceeded to argue with my assessment of his assignment and then tried to point out how I was wrong. I tried giving him ideas on how to incorporate his ideas into a new, more complete essay, but he wouldn’t listen to anything I was saying. As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, he then started to argue with me about whether or not “cookbook” is one or two words. After proving my point by looking “cookbook” up in the dictionary and seeing that it was in fact one word, he still wanted to argue that the pronunciation or syllable dot in between cook and book meant that it is supposed to be written in two words.
By this point I had pretty much had all I could take. I told him to spell cookbook however he wanted and to leave his paper the way it was if he wanted to. I guess this response finally grabbed his attention. Now that he was finally listening to what I was saying, he asked me how he should write and word his paper to meet the assignment. I wasn’t going to waste my time explaining myself for a second time, so I told him to do it however you want I have already given you all of my suggestions.
posted by Danae at 10:51 PM
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