And so it Begins...

Wow. My first tutoring session was difficult.

I thinking back to that fateful day when I received my first tutoring session throws me into a type of Twilight Zone where all of my worst nightmares came true.

At least that's what it felt like, anyway.

My first session turned out to be a non-traditional student who hadn't written an essay for 20 years. When the student told me this I about blanched, thinking to myself "Oh great! Both of us have no idea what we're doing." I remember shaking so bad as I introduced myself and sat down with him and his paper. Lucky for me he was on the second draft of his paper, and most of the hard stuff had been fixed by more experienced tutor than I earlier that morning.

 I wasn't sure how to proceed, and I felt like I was bungling around. The things that we had been talking about in class came echoing back to me (thank goodness!) and I asked the student about the assignment. He was supposed to write an essay as a response to the reactions of a character in a short story or article that had been assigned for homework.

Panic number one: I wasn't sure how to deal with an essay that was a response to a character's reaction. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and to my dismay, the student didn't have a prompt that I could work with.

Oh boy.

I felt like I was stumbling through a forest full of spiderwebs, unsure of what action I should take, what question I should ask next--I'll be honest; I have no idea how this student understood what I was trying to tell him. I very sketchily sounded back what I understood and I hoped and prayed that the student wouldn't catch on that I needed about as much help as he did.

And still we pressed on.

Things didn't seem to get a ton better before we hit some grammar problems. There were commas in strange places, interesting word usage, and sentences that read like a three wheeled wagon on gravel. 

Panic number two: I had no idea what the heck I was talking about when it came to grammar rules and names. 

I found myself using the horrible "this sounds wonky" phrase I mentioned in my last post and tripped over recalling terms. I felt like it went pretty bad. I could tell I needed to explain things different ways when the shadow of confusion dashed across his face, and it got harder when I realized I couldn't think of a way to simplify it.

About half way through the session, the student mentioned that he had a class soon, and that he would need to get his revisions taken care of within the next 30 minutes.

Panic number three: I was faced with the ever-terrifying session time crunch. 

Being unable to finish reading the whole paper blindsided me. I had to force myself to calm down and think straight. I ended up taking a leaf out of Claire's book and looking at the conclusion to see if the student had completed the assignment.

Thankfully, he had managed to tie everything back to his thesis in the introduction and it didn't need a whole lot of reconstruction. I was so relieved to discover I had managed to finish on time, leaving the student at least 20 minutes to take care of his edits.

All in all, I think it's safe to say that the session went alright, at least on the student's end. I've seen him numerous times working on things in the Writing Center, and I've received a positive reaction when I have said hello to him.

I can definitely say I learned a lot from that first tutoring session. I have a lot to work on, like staying calm, for example, and I'm really looking forward to honing my tutoring skills so that future sessions will leave me feeling like I did my job effectively.

Turning Student Expectations Around

I have not been terribly disappointed in student expectations.  Most of the students I have helped have come to the session prepared to work, and they are generally compliant with requests and amenable to my suggestions.

I had one student this week, however, who really struggled with focusing.  I was trying to impress upon him the importance of fixing certain structural weaknesses in his paper, and he kept introducing tangential information, personal stories, irrelevant personal opinion, and the like.  We were working on an outline, and he repeatedly turned the sheet over (we were writing the outline on the back of the last page of his paper) to point out how segments of his paper related to his personal life and his feelings about politics.  This made it difficult for me to conclude the session in a timely manner or to help him understand how important it was for him to organize his paper.  After taking far more time than was appropriate or useful, I finally turned the sheet over, quickly summarized the essential elements that his paper needed, and let him know he had work to do (I did so cordially and encouragingly, of course).

In meeting with this student, I got the feeling that he had come to me for a conversation more than for assistance with his paper.  It seemed he had many unresolved feelings about recent events in his life and he was using me as an opportunity to express them.  I imagine that he treats many people this way, including his professors.

This highlighted something that I’ve come to believe about student expectations over the last couple of weeks: They want us to be, in a word, their therapists.  Not that they want to express their feelings to us in most or even many circumstances.  But so many times asking what a student needs help with and getting that oh-so-common response—“Grammar”—has led me to realize that we are, like a therapist, a filler of gaps.  A student comes in with little idea of what they really need, and it is our job to diagnose and devise treatment for their particular problem.  We are expected to find the gaps in a student’s understanding or performance and fill them.

Naturally, we want more than anything to help students help themselves.  We can help them identify the gaps, but we want them to do most of the filling.  When a student tells me that they need help with their “Grammar,” that is my cue to start looking for gaps.  To find the gaps, I need to know the layout of the land, so to speak.  That is, I need to know what they are expected by their professor to do, and what the student has actually done.  Once I have determined that the student has failed to satisfy the teacher’s demands, I can point to specific gaps that they have failed to fill on their own.  My job, at that point, is to show them how a shovel is used, and to put them to work.

Another way to put this, which I prefer, is that our responsibility is to make students expect of themselves what they expect of us, and to help them find the tools to meet those expectations.

Supposing a student is unwilling to work with me on the gaps I have helped him to find, my options at that point are limited.  The best thing I can suggest in such cases is to move on to the next gap.  If all of the gaps have been exhausted, it is probably time to conclude the session cordially and move on to students with fewer personal barriers.

Liquid Cement

    Somewhere along the line, the job description of what a writing tutor is gets lost in translation. We are not editors, despite every fiber of our collective being telling us to fix any and all grammatical mistakes we come across. Our job is to sit down with the student, look over their paper, and discus the grander details while mentioning more minor problems like grammar along the way. It is harder for some of us than others, and I often find myself obsessing over a single train wreck of a sentence when the whole paper is falling apart around me. And many tutees encourage this. Time after time after sitting down with a student, they will assure the tutor that they only want help with commas and the mystical, vaguely defined concept of “flow”. They want an editor, but writing tutors aren’t editors. As much as we love to get hung up on the little things, our job is to sit a tutee down and teach them something. Something that, with luck, will make them better writers in the end.

    Of course, there are those tutees that are impossible to get through to. Some go so far as to completely ignore anything not related to simple grammatical errors. They bring an essay that is in ruins and, before the tutor even gets a chance to look it over, the tutee assures them that they just want want someone to make sure they are using commas correctly. “My writing is good,” they say, sure that what they just handed off to the poor, unsuspecting tutor is straight Dickens, “it’s the commas I’m worried about. Does it flow well, you think?” And, of course, it doesn’t flow well. Reading their essay is like trying to suck liquid cement through a bendy straw.

    With all that's going on in a tutees head, it's understandable that they might be a little confused. However, the tutors are there to teach them, not to be their editors. As much as we want to tear your paper to shreds, fixing every conceivable mistake, it's much more beneficial to everyone involved if we instead spend the time teaching the tutee how to fix their own writing. Teach a man to fish, and all that jazz. It can be annoying, sometimes downright migraine inducing, but this is the job. This is what we, as writing tutors, are here for. Anybody can point out mistakes in a paper, but it takes a special breed of person to have the patience required to work through absolutely abysmal writing with the writer and show them through the process.

Expectations

So far, student expectations of the writing center have aligned very accurately with my own. If the student's expectations differ from mine, it is usually a difference of vocabulary. Whereas I do not describe what I and my fellow tutors do in the writing center as "proofreading" or "going over papers," many students use this sort of terminology. I do not think this is much of a problem, because, underneath the surface terminology, the student generally has similar expectations.

Where I think student expectations truly diverge from those of tutors is in regard to the longevity of the skills taught. Whereas students generally just want their paper improved, tutors seek to improve the students' writing. Although there is this difference in objective, I do not think it causes much of a problem, because the means to accomplish these two different goals are essentially the same.

Student Expectations

I have actually had many experiences where the student had strange expectations of the writing center. The most common thing I've encountered is students who desire to have someone proofread their paper. For the most part the students are fine with looking at other things once you are able to sit down and have a discussion with them, but every once in a while I have come across tutees who really just wanted their paper to be edited for grammar mistakes and grammar mistakes alone. I find it strange that the students who make these requests usually have much bigger fish to fry than spelling mistakes and misplaced commas. Anyhow, I have found that the best way to handle these sessions is usually just to have an open dialogue with the student about the goals of the writing center. Sometimes the students are using terms such as "edit" or "proofread" when they simply mean they want someone to work through the paper with them. Having a conversation with the student will often reveal that the student wants help on the paper as a whole but just doesn’t know how to voice their concerns specifically.

Another thing that students will sometimes expect is that they will leave the writing center with a perfect paper. They are often under the false impression that we are here to fix every aspect of their writing and that by making the effort to walk in the writing center that they have earned the right to a flawless essay. Perhaps the thing that is even more frustrating for me as a tutor is when a student walks in and says that he or she is just there because they have to be, and that they don't really care about or want to work on their assignment. It isn't right for students to expect for us to give them a brown slip for a session that they don't participate in. I have learned that a good way of dealing with these students is to still have them identify the things they want to work on or are concerned about. If they can't or don't tell you what they want to work on, then sometimes this gives you an opportunity to mention some things that are often weak in papers that you could focus on in the session.


The best specific example of an encounter I’ve had regarding student expectations was with a student who came in during summer semester. He was working on an extremely long research based paper, and clearly he had already put in a lot of work on the paper. I could tell that he was burned out on it, so it came as no surprise when he wanted me to go through and just catch his grammar mistakes and spelling errors. His expectation was that the session needed to be as long as it took to work through all of the pages, and that because he had already done such a huge amount of research that he should be exempt from having to edit for such simple things. The simple remedy to this situation was to discuss with the student what some more realistic goals for the session could be and explain to him that we needed to try and keep the session to about 30 minutes long. Everything worked out in the end, and I think he left feeling pleased with his experience. I guess the main thing that I learned from that situation was that the best way to bridge the gap between student and tutor expectations is to be honest and politely explain that the goal of the writing center is always to help create better writers, and not just to help make better papers.

Changing Expectations

It’s no secret that student’s expectations when walking through the door often differ from the way in which the Writing Center actually works. Some expectations concern what we do, what we don’t do, and what the student is supposed to leave with. Some students have no idea what we do, and we can easily change their expectations, or lack thereof, so that they have a positive experience in the Writing Center. The students who come in expecting one thing and cannot change their expectations or accept what we do are the students who leave frustrated.

The most difficult students to work with are the students who think we are an editing service. They assumes that we take their paper, mark it up, and hand back an A paper. These students do not want to learn and do not want to listen. Some of these false assumptions can be nipped in the bud by explaining what we do right from the start, especially if the student admits to not knowing what we do. “We are tutors not editors” is a point that needs to be emphasized. I once had a session with a student who would have been happy if I never opened my mouth and if she never had to either. When she was actually listening and paying attention, she cut me off in the middle of explanations, brushing them off saying “Yeah I know.” The problem was that, based on her paper, she clearly did not know. At the end of the session, the only time she actually made eye contact with me, she asked if she had an A paper. After explaining that I couldn’t promise her an A, she left angry and frustrated, although I’m not sure that that mood was any worse than the one she walked in with. She was a student who would not have changed her expectations even if I were able to have explained that we don’t just correct papers.

On the other side of expectations are the students who come in and don’t expect us to do anything for them. They are there for a brown slip and credit. It can be fun to change these students’ expectations. I once had a session where a student prefaced the session by explaining that he did not want to change anything, the paper was just how he wanted it and he was only there because his professor required it. This student’s paper was very well written and well organized, but I was still able to point out some areas where he could expand, some areas where his point wasn’t clear, and I helped him to refocus his thesis, which ended up not being the point he had made by the time he was finished writing the paper. Although his paper was good, arguable an A paper for the class level and assignment requirements, this student actually cared about his paper, and I was able to help him improve it. He expected to walk in the door and take nothing from the session but a brown slip, but he was pleasantly surprised.

Expectations can certainly hinder a session when they aren’t met, but we can change expectation for the better so that students can have a positive experience when they come to see us.

Expectations

So far, most of the tutees coming in have had some kind of expectation about what they want me to help them with. From grammar to punctuation, to sentence structure, most of them seemed to have some kind of idea about their paper before coming in. Sometimes this idea was due in part to professor comments, while other times it was due to a peer review, or just the student's personal feelings.
Today I had a student come in who was convinced that her punctuation was awful, in particular her comma placement, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. This student in particular had some problems with sentence structure, and also had placed several exclamation points throughout her essay. Though she hadn't even noticed these problems, she was rather receptive to them once I pointed them out. She asked a lot of questions, and I did my best to help her understand what the issues were in regards to her paper.
Thankfully, I am yet to come across a tutee that refuses to acknowledge the advice I am giving. Thus far all of my tutees have been helpful, curious, and receptive to what I say.
However, if I were to encounter this issue, I feel that I would try to find a middle ground. Perhaps at the start of the session I would say something like "Okay, but if you don't mind I'm going to look at everything, just to make sure its all correct." If they don't respond well to this, I would move on. And while I would point out grammar (or the like) if I found it, I would try to also point out the issues with the thesis and more at the same time. "You know, I haven't seen a (insert student's concern here) problem here, but I do see this. I think if you  rephrased or restructured here it would make a little more sense," and explain to them why. The why is always very important. Obviously, the tutee is free to not take my advice, but I feel that I should always help to try and improve their writing. That is, after all, why I am here in the first place.

I hope that my response to the class discussion and my blog post don’t overlap too much, but I have had many experiences with student expectations not lining up with my own expectations for the session.

I will never forget one session in particular because it was the one that Claire observed at the end of my training in May. The writer came in and wanted help on grammar issues and only grammar issues. I started reading through her paper and found many other issues with the writing. The writing didn’t have a thesis or many clear points, but she did not want any suggestion on things other than grammar. Whenever I brought up a point about the thesis or organizational issues, she would say something like “Well my writing is fine, I’m just here for the grammar part of my paper.” It was a very nerve wrecking experience, but I found that if I just tried to balance her priorities and mine throughout the session, she would accept my advice.

I guess I sort of mirrored the “insult sandwich” in which I give someone a compliment, a small insult, and then another compliment to soften the blow. I would help her with a grammar pattern, ask her how she could be more specific about her points in the paper, and then explain another grammar error.

I have also had many sessions that have started with the sentence, “I just want you to go over my paper.” Every time I encounter this, I start to ask questions to get a more specific answer from the tutee. I often grab the notepad on the table and ask them to write down a few specific things they would like to go over. This often motivates them to really consider what they are concerned with. Throughout the session, I work to include all of the points they wrote down as well as any other fundamental issues I find with the writing. If I make the tutee’s concerns a priority, they are usually open to what I have to say.

Sometimes the writers expect an error free paper, but don’t understand that the teachers are looking for much more than misspellings and punctuation errors. I wish that we could have a meeting with all tutees coming in to the Writing Center to explain the writing process and about how it takes much feedback before a nearly perfect paper is produced. I feel that while student expectations sometimes conflict with my own expectations of a session, these problems can be worked through with some compromise and patience.