The Good, the Bad, and the Seriously Ugly

Emotional students can be one of the most difficult things to have to deal with in the Writing Center. For every few "normal" session, you'll have an exhaustingly emotional one. Whether the tutee ends up crying all over their paper or punching a hole in the wall, you're there to help them write the best paper they can. As much as some of us want to be, we're no more psychiatrists than we are editors.

It can be incredibly draining to have to ride an emotional roller coaster, as anyone who's dated someone with mental illness can tell you. Now, that's not to say that emotional tutees are defective in some way, even though some may very well be. Tutoring an emotional student can be very much like dating or, alternatively, just being around someone who is mentally unstable. Both are needy, the extent of which depends on their current mental state, and neither are necessarily trying to ruin your day. In many situations, they just can't help it. It's not their fault that they start crying at the mention of their father or that they get upset about a confusing task. On the flip side, there are times when they can be emotional for seemingly no reason. It's very hard to judge what will set someone off, whether they're just an emotional human being or they have some sort of disorder. You just have to try your best to help them out in any way you can, while still maintaining your distance to a certain extent.

The mental illness connection might seem like a bit of a stretch, but I think that anybody who's been in a situation like that knows what I'm talking about. You want to help, and sometimes you're successful, but there's nothing wrong with removing yourself from a potentially harmful situation. If the tutee is getting far too emotional, as is often the case with angry tutees, you're not abandoning them by suggesting they come back a different time or by breaking things off entirely. Sometimes there's nothing you can do to help someone and, as terrible as it may seem, you have yourself to think about.

With all that being said, when you find yourself dealing with an emotional tutee, it's up to your discretion whether or not to continue the session. Sometimes you can calm the tutee down and get to work, or sometimes you may need to just wait the storm out and occupy yourself with what you're going to talk about when it's over. There's also nothing wrong with trying to comfort a tutee, especially if they're stressed out about the assignment and just need someone to tell them they're not going as poorly as they think. A reassuring hand on the shoulder might be all they need to get them refocused and able to work through their paper. Just, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, don't touch their elbow. Nobody needs that.

Emotional Tutoring

I keep remembering the experience I had a few weeks ago in the WC with a student who was composing an essay on an emotional experience. She had some health issues which had impacted her life very deeply. The paper was difficult to read due to the emotional nature of the content. Additionally, it was difficult due to my own traumatic health experience. Unfortunately, I believe I made a mistake when I told her about my own experiences with health and medicines. It would have been better for us both if I had simply focused on the quality of the paper. I believe that by relating my own experiences, even though I wanted her to know that her own story was not "weird," I unfortunately detracted from her reason for coming in to the WC. She was not there for therapy; she was there for help with her paper. If I could relive that session, I would simply let her know that, since she was writing a personal narrative, her experience was valid, no matter how "weird" it might seem. My own "weird" experience has no bearing on any student's writing.

A Meaningful Experience

While I have tutored a few emotional students, I have tutored many highly emotional papers. The most emotionally charged paper I have tutored was a paper a woman wrote about watching her father being murdered by her step-grandfather. Besides experiencing shock and horror at reading about the murder, the paper was full of every emotion. The paper started out by describing the perfect, beautiful day she had had with her brother and her father before he was murdered. When I asked her a question about it, she went into more detail and her face lit up. She was reliving that moment, and she was happy while remembering it. The paper then turned to fear when her drunken grandfather confronted her father. Confusion was next when she was described how her little girl mind could not figure out what the loud bang was or why her father was on the ground. The paper ended with anger: anger at her stepfather for killing her father, anger at her grandmother for lying to the police to protect her husband, and anger at life for being unfair.

After finishing the paper (which took a long time because I was new, and I wanted to make sure she knew I cared about her story), we were both pretty emotionally drained. She had been on the verge of tears for most of the paper, but she said that she had really wanted to get the story out. We talked for a bit after and she explained to me that she had found peace after many years of struggling with her father’s death. This was a sad kind of peace, I could see that in her eyes, but she was ok.

The best part about tutoring this paper was the connection I made with the student. She shared her deepest emotions in the paper and even more with me, and I felt her emotions and was moved by them. The following week she came back into the center and waited for me to get out of the session I was in. I walked up to her and asked her how she was, and she told me she wanted to say thanks. She said that her professor had told her it was one of the best narrative pieces he had ever read. She was almost in tears again, and I was so happy for her. She had been able to share her sensitive story and get that weight off her chest all while getting a fantastic grade and validation of her story through her professor.

Technically, that session wasn’t one of my best, but it was one of my favorites. It really meant a lot to student and to me as well. When she came back, I was validated as a new tutor that I was making a difference. Emotions ran high, and we were drained after the session was over, but those emotions made the session a meaningful experience.

What does "Emotional" mean anyway?

It seemed to me that in our class discussion, we seemed to only equate sad or downtrodden students to being "emotional." We briefly brought up students who are overly happy with what they have written, and I started to mention that I had a situation with a student who was hostile, but overall it seemed that our conversation revolved around students who were sad. I want to just take a minute to bring up the fact that there are other emotions that can really impact a session. The emotions that I feel I have witnessed the very most are stress and frustration.Students have stress over what the professor wants, stress about getting a paper done in time, stress about their personal life, and sometimes even stress about coming in to get tutored. I have definitely been in a position where uncertainty about a professor's expectations has caused me great distress, so I try to be sympathetic when this is the student's complaint. There have been a few particularly interesting sessions where I have felt that the student was there to vent more than to be  tutored. The sessions started out the same as usual, with me calling out the student's name and asking them where they would like to sit. That's where the normal ended. It was if making contact with the chair was a switch that turned the students on to vent mode. The student's would complain about how awful or unfair their professor was, about how stupid the assignment was, about getting cut off in traffic, etc... Most of the time I have been able to bring the student back into focus, but I remember a few instances where I could not fit a word in edgewise during a student's rant. Stress/ frustration is a very real emotion, and I understand that sometimes a person has got to just get everything out of their system so they can move forward, but it is not our role to be a therapist. Dealing with stressed out students can be really hard.

I'm thinking that the reason we talked about emotional writing mostly in the terms of people who are or who write about something sad is because that might be the hardest emotion to handle. It is uncomfortable for both tutor and tutee when a paper delves into deeply emotional subject matter, especially if crying occurs or if noticeable pain is evident on the student's face. I haven't had a whole lot of experiences where the student has been upset or cried in front of me, but I definitely have read some pretty heavy stuff. Personal narratives seem to be the usual source for sad material. When people talk about family members, best friends, pets, or lovers dying I really have a hard time knowing what to do. I'm naturally very sympathetic, and I know I maybe shouldn't, but I always try to express my condolences to the student. It just doesn't feel right to me to not say " I am so sorry" when someone loses a loved one, especially when that person is a random stranger who has trusted me to read their paper. That being said, I do know where the boundary lies. I try not to dwell on the sadness, and I quickly return back to tutoring.

Emotional Writing

I am having a hard time remembering any other sessions that have included emotional writing that I have not already included in my response on this topic, so I will start talking about my own experiences with emotional writing.

When I was younger, I was very intimidated by the thought of my peers reading or listening to my writing. The idea made me sick to my stomach to even consider letting one of my friends read what I had wrote. This was not because I was writing anything especially personal or embarrassing, but because I felt that my writing was a direct representation of my thoughts and my character, which was something that I had always been able to keep to myself. I did not want to give anybody the opportunity to judge me based on what I had written, and I was convinced that they would. I felt that I had some expectation to live up to, and I did not want to disappoint anybody based on my subpar writing skills.

In the eighth grade, we were required to do a poetry project that included writing many different types of poems and compiling them into one large collection of our own poems. Throughout preparing for this project, we were asked to share some of these poems with our classmates. Each time that I was asked to share one of my poems, I wanted to leave the classroom and never come back. Although I had always loved English and writing, there was nothing I dreaded more than those days in that class.

I am honestly not quite sure when I got over that fear, but I slowly started to realize that writing is not directly indicative of a person’s intelligence or character. I still feel a little awkward when I am waiting for a peer to read over my assignment to give me advice to improve it, but I have since learned that having a few other people look over my writing can improve it exponentially. I have also gained a greater confidence about my writing that has allowed me to take criticism and use it to enhance my future assignments.

This is why I am especially understanding of people that come in that are obviously nervous about the whole tutoring process. The Writing Center can be an incredibly intimidating place before a person comes in to meet the tutor and is hopefully comforted by the tutor. I have sat down with many people in a session where their discomfort was apparent while reading their paper out loud. Usually by the end of the session, they understand the importance of hearing what they have written in order to notice and fix any mistakes that have been made. I have found that my own experiences with emotional writing have helped me better comfort any tutees that come in feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed about their own writing.

When you are your own worst example nothing quite compares...

My example about myself, which I mentioned in class, is the only real experience with emotional students and emotional writing that I have. My professor had asked for a 5 page response paper in place of a final exam and set out some stipulations for the sort of academic quality he expected in a paper that was replacing an exam. As I mentioned, I had some complicating life circumstances going on in my personal life. I tried for days to write the paper and ended up sitting down two hours before it was due and having an emotional meltdown on paper, which I then handed in. (Don’t worry, I made my emotional meltdown relevant to the class by concluding with a short paragraph about how the literature had expanded my views on the human experience and how that had made me more capable of handling what was going on in my personal life). From my experience as an emotional writer, I learned that it’s a good idea to let people vent because they probably won’t be able to concentrate on anything else until they do. However, we all know we aren’t therapists and we also can’t listen for a half hour while other people are waiting for tutors. The most emotion I’ve seen from students in the Writing Center up to this point is frustration over a professor or stress-out students who are overwhelmed by having to much to do (or feeling incapable of doing what was assigned). One girl I worked with was frustrated trying to understand what the professor wanted from the assignment and I could see that she had put a lot of hard work into writing a paper that didn’t fit what the professor was asking for. I tried to keep the conversation very simple and explain slowly – I also wanted to not just out and say, “Take this page out because it isn’t what the professor wants.” I tried to go through the explanation of the assignment and connect the requirements with what she had already written, focusing on comments like, “This paragraph fits really well with this part of the assignment…This idea responds to this part of the assignment…Now let’s connect these parts with the main idea…” Some students sit down and promptly point out that they hate English and don’t understand it and they know they can’t write but they need a better grade. I think there’s usually some emotion behind that, even if they aren’t demonstrating it openly. With one student, I tried to be a mini-cheerleader and point out all the things the tutee had down well on. We spent the majority of the session talking about what was correct and what fit the assignment than about what needed to be fixed. At the end, I made a list of three things for the tutee to “touch up” when he did his revisions. I think he left more confident in himself than when he started, though I’m not sure I handled it the best.

When Emotional Writing is Important--Just Not for a Class

My most interesting experience recently was when I had to help a tutee who had written a paper about how her mother died a year ago this month.  When I finished the first paragraph, I stopped.  I didn't really know how to deal with a paper like this, especially in a public setting like the writing center.  In a one-on-one setting with no prying ears, I would have felt more capable and willing to show the writer the sympathy that I felt.  After considering a few platitudes that would sound. . .well, like platitudes, I went on reading the paper.
When I finished, I glanced at the tutee.  Her bottom lip was quivering.  Looking at the paper, I felt that nothing I could say or do would do anything but cheapen what she had written.  Why should she care about comma splices when she was mourning her mother's death?
The main problem was that she had written a piece that needed to be written.  The things she said were things that needed to be said.  I didn't want her to change anything, or especially to cut anything out.  At the same time, she had not met the requirements of the assignment.  The teacher had asked for a narrative, but, aside from pointing out how her mother died, the tutee had only written about her feelings and fears following the event.  I couldn't think of a way to tell her, "Please give more details about how your mother died.  Fill out your account of what happened."  I felt my options were either to not help her or to be cruel.
I spent the rest of the session helping her with grammar issues.  That seemed to calm her down a bit, but it did little to address the main problem in her paper.  At the end of the session, though, I couldn't stay silent.  As she stood up to leave, I mentioned that she might want to look at adding more details to her account.
For me the whole event was kind of a daze.  I felt a strong desire to talk to her as a friend rather than a tutor, and to give her sympathy--to validate the pain she described in her paper.  But I felt shackled by the constraints of my position and my capability.  I don't think I could have said anything that would have really helped her.  I wasn't the person she needed at that moment.
After talking with Claire about the experience, I feel more free to express some sympathy in future events like this, but also to encourage the tutee to keep what they wrote for themselves, but to write something else that would meet the demands of the assignment.

Learning (Why) To Write Papers

I can't really point to an event or lesson that taught me how to write the way I write today.  The learning curve was very gradual.  I can remember some events and studies that contributed, though.

I know that I was taught the basic essay structure sometime in high school.  I think it was in 10th grade history class.  My teacher taught us the "5 paragraph" structure and gave us plenty of opportunity to practice it.  He was preparing us for an AP exam, so the opportunities were always in-class, and were always timed.  As I learn by contemplation and depend heavily on rewriting, this method didn't leave a lasting impression.  I was interested, however, in the theory behind essay-writing.  Up to that point, I hadn't really read academic writing--everything I read was in a magazine, novel, or textbook.  My teacher said, "You could write an essay about bungee-jumping to practice."  I wrote down the idea, then never actually did it, but it gave me something to think about that would gestate for several years: The capacity for focused writing to explore a particular topic.  I don't recall caring much about essay writing after that until I got to college.

Later in my high school education, I had an AP English teacher who was a complete beast to me.  My papers came back red and smelly (not really--she wore ok perfume).  I felt like my teacher was constantly haranguing me about this or that little detail in my essays.  My essays, far as I could tell, were no good.  I didn't have high hopes about passing the AP Exam, but I did it anyway.  During the essay portion of the Exam, I wrote a long and passionate essay about Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton.  I was sure my friends had done better than I had.  Surprisingly, the day the scores came back, my teacher came up to me and said, "I knew you'd get a five!" and handed me my results.  Sure enough--a perfect five.  My attitude about essays changed for the better after that.  It's wonderful what success can do!

My favored form of essay writing these days is the philosophical essay.  Studying philosophy in college has given my essay-writing a sharp elbow to the stomach.  Philosophers write with so many different forms and standards, with one primary goal: Make It Work.  Studying so much philosophy, my preconceptions about what an essay has to be have faded away, and I've come to focus much more on what academic writing is about: It's not about form or structure or following a code; it's about thinking, analyzing, contemplating, and guiding others to do the same.  And, of course, giving others an opportunity to respond to something they hadn't thought about, and perhaps give you an opportunity to learn something from their response.  Structure just helps us accomplish this important task.

Drama Bomb!

Working with other people's writing can be very touchy and sensitive, especially with people who are not used to rejection and criticism. I will admit to being this way when I was first began writing. To this day, no one has seen the manuscript of the first novel I ever started because I don't want to receive criticism on it because it is so close to my raw emotions and insecurities at that time in my life.

Since then I've taken several creative writing classes that required me to go buy some big girl panties and not take criticism so personally. Usually the first instinct when receiving feedback or criticism is to defend and explain away what you were trying to accomplish in the piece. In the creative writing classes I've taken so far at Weber, it has been heavily emphasized that when you get published, you will not be able to stand by each and every one of your readers and explain every detail you included. Therefore, during workshops, the workshopee is NOT allowed to talk at all while the class discusses what worked and did not work. 

I'll admit it was hard to abide by the rules at first. When you work on something with your whole heart and soul and throw it into the shark tank, it kills you to see your brain child, your baby, that piece of you that manifested itself on paper get torn to shreds. 

After doing this for several consecutive semesters, I've grown quite the skin and it's easier for me to weed out the good criticism from the bad. The only downside is, my sympathy gland has a nice thick layer of callous over it. When I see someone starting to get defensive or over emotional about something they've written I immediately think of Lumpy Space Princess:

I realize it is horrible of me, but as a writer, it is necessary to have that thick skin when trying to get things published because the writer's life is rejection after rejection after rejection. Every good writer has been told they are not good enough more times than they can count. It becomes pretty pointless to take criticism personally because it will only discourage you and prevent you from submitting or even  writing ever again.

I also realize that as a tutor, I need to find some way to kindly treat papers of students who are emotionally attached to what they are writing about. I haven't yet dealt with an example of this yet, but I am thinking the best way to deal with it would be to find unoffensive and gentle ways of suggesting a better way to say things. Or if the emotion is so overwhelming that nothing is getting done in the session, I would think it'd be best to end the session.

Overall, dealing with emotionally charged writing is a very tender work, and I'm hoping that my intuition will come through when I get one in a tutoring session. I won't be completely callous when it comes to emotions attached to writing, and when the time comes I'll do my best to find the best action possible to help the session be productive.

More Than Basketball

            Before my first tutoring session, I was very nervous about starting tutoring here. It seemed odd to me how nervous I was. While I’m no expert tutor nor claim some great ability as such, I had to remind myself that this was not my first time tutoring or even teaching. I had taught elementary, junior high, and even high school students before. I asked myself, “Why am I so nervous then?” This gave me the small boost of confidence I needed finally grab that white slip from the Office Assistant and get to work. Oddly enough, that first session was an exciting albeit typical tutoring session. I read the student’s name on the white slip aloud and my first tutoring session began.

            Whenever I meet anyone for the first time, I always try to learn something unique about them. My first tutee was no different. After sitting down with her, I tried to break the ice with chit-chat. She seemed nervous, as though I would leap upon her paper like a ravenous wolf and tear it to shreds. As we chatted, she said she’d come from China. Excitedly, I started speaking to her in Mandarin. She stared blankly at me after I asked her where specifically in China she lived. This blank response is fairly common, at least to me. After all, here I am – a tall, pudgy, Caucasian man – unexpectedly speaking Mandarin. I usually give the person with whom I am speaking a moment to realize they are not hearing something before repeating my question. She blinked, returning from wherever her mind had gone, and replied that she was from Shang Hai.

            A moment later, we were reviewing her personal narrative. Her essay recounted a basketball tournament in which her high school team played. Her high school team was the underdog. Unlike the typical American underdog story, her basketball team loses the tournament. At one point in her essay, she tries to use a Chinese idiom to explain her main point. She simply stated, “No brother no basketball.” This phrase made me pause and I asked her what she meant. After struggling to explain her intention in English, she asked me if she could explain her intent in Mandarin. I had no qualms with that and said she could. The basic explanation of her meaning was that without brotherhood, a team cannot play basketball nor can they succeed. While her team did not win the tournament, they learned the importance of working together to accomplish their goals. Yes, it does sound like the basketball version of Remember the Titans, yet these players and spectators were truly changed by this experience.

            When the tutoring session concluded, we chatted for a moment more. This experience has been generally repeated in all my tutoring sessions. Granted, not all the papers have been about basketball games, but each essay I've read, whether they were personal narrative or something else, has portrayed some meaningful event in each tutee’s life. Personally, I love a good story and love sharing stories, whether my own or someone else’s.

Emotions!

What kind of experience have you had with emotional students or emotional writing?  It doesn't necessarily have to be directly from the WC; I assume you've all had some kind of experience with emotions and writing. What did you do?

How I Learned to Write

 Before I began my first college experience at Southern Virginia University in 2002, I was part of an advanced math and English program. By my junior year of high school, I was taking concurrent enrollment classes at a local community college. While most of the classes related more to creative writing and literature, one was a class on an argumentative research paper. It was my first experience with a long paper (25 pages), and also my first college paper.

Prior to that program, my best English teacher, in regards to writing, was my father. He taught me how to organize essays and structure arguments. He also taught me how to do massive amounts of research in a short amount of time. I always took my essays to him, and he always had comments on how to improve them.

Between these two experiences, I arrived at college equipped with several tools related to critical thinking and rhetoric. I only took a few classes at SVU, and none were related to English as I had a different major. Still, I was able to write well and rarely received a poor grade on an essay.

By the time I got to English 2010 at Utah Valley University (I skipped over 1010 due to the writing class in high school) I had a fairly refined craft. The only learning curve I faced occurred with different modes of writing, but I viewed them more as ways of structuring arguments rather than different writing styles or modes. I managed to do well in that class with minimal effort.

Honestly, I would rather have had a difficult 2010 class, one with a demanding teacher who insisted on clear delineations between different types of writing assignments. There is a part of me that feels I didn’t start moving beyond the five-paragraph essay until English 3010, Academic Writing. I look back at some of my previous essays that received high grades and feel I should have been held to a higher standard.

It’s especially unhelpful when, sometimes, I feel that I haven’t done very well on an assignment, yet still receive A’s. When I’ve completely multiple drafts and workshopped a piece, I usually have a sense of whether that essay is “good” or needs further revision. Other times, when I am rushed by a deadline and have to submit, the process of how I got an A seems like a mystery, a sensation compounded when the teacher only uses check marks or empty statements, such as “nice,” in the margins.

So, by one standard, I have always known “how to do it,” based on the terms of the assignment and the requirements of the teacher, with minimal amounts of further instruction. By a different standard, I still needed to be taught how to write a proper collegiate essay beyond the point where I feel I should have learned how to do so. Even now I couldn’t exactly define the difference between “analytical” and “argumentative,” or “analytical” and “research,” although I do see a distinction between an argumentative essay and a research paper.

Learning to Writing

The first essays I was introduced to were argumentative, persuasive, and research. I was taught and instructed in the different forms of essays during my middle school years and first year of high school. It was my second year in middle school, eighth grade, that I was first introduced to the simple five paragraph essay. Here, I was taught that the first paragraph include the motivating sentence or “the hook” along with the thesis. My eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, emphasized the importance of writing the introduction as the most exciting paragraph(s) in the whole paper. She said and I quote, “The intro gives a preview to your readers about what your paper is going to be. You want to invite and convince your audience to read what you have to say.” Along with the introduction, I learned what should be included in the body of the paper, the topic sentences and their supporting details. In the conclusion, Mrs. Johnson taught her classes that this should me the second most exciting paragraph(s) in the essay. Mrs. Johnson emphasized, “One should strive to create a paper that begins and ends in a similar way. You want an exciting intro to convince your audience to read your stuff, but you also want to end in a way that they will remember what you said.” Looking back at this particular English class, everything was relatively easy compared to what I am required to write now, just simple argumentative and research essays the followed the five paragraph essay format. In ninth grade, the assignments became more complicated. In my Earth’s Systems science class, I was required to write a minimum four page research paper every couple of weeks. I remember writing more papers for that class my freshman year of high than for any other class I had that year. For my ninth grade English class, I was required to compose an argumentative or persuasive paper every so often. In this class, the teacher would assign the class a paper varying in different page length to be written in either the argumentative or persuasive essay form. This is where I picked up the basic blocks of writing. My sophomore year of high, tenth grade English helped me become more familiar with these different types and forms of writing. 

The high school I ended up enrolling in, NUAMES Early College High School, has a partnership with Weber State University. This high school offered an Early College. Students could graduate with an Associate’s degree by the time they have their high school diploma. Students have the opportunity to enroll in actual college classes on campus while receiving college and high school credit for the classes that are taken. My last two years of high school were spent taking college courses. The few English courses and other classes that incorporated writing put the writing skills I had at the time to the test. I was a little unsure in the area of writing when I first started my college career. In fact, I felt very much unprepared for what was expected of me. The few English classes I had taken in middle school and my first year of high school along with the assignments that were assigned were simple, nothing as complex as what I needed to compose in college. To make sure I would fail, I took to the internet to become more educated in academic writing at the college level. My first couples of semesters were hard making that transition in levels of writing. Fortunately, there were a few professors that were considerate and understanding in their grading.

I would defiantly say there was a learning curve. I had to try and progress in my writing skills to keep up and on top of things at the college level. Everything that I was taught in middle and high school, in my opinion, was not enough for what I needed to do to keep up in my college course. As a result I found a way to cope with what was ask of me by taking to the internet and learning the information and knowledge needed to accomplish what needed to be done.