A few Tuesdays ago I had the best tutoring session yet, not because it went well but because it was a total mess and I still managed to keep it together. I had a very attractive client (this is important) who was leaving for Thanksgiving and had a stack of essays that would be due for each of her classes right after the vacation so she made an appointment at the Johnston center with the intention to hand them to me and browse Facebook on her cellphone until I was done marking all the errors.
The first was an ENC1101 paper that required her to interview an instrumental member of her community and write about their passion for public service. I asked the student what she'd written and she was resistant to saying anything more than that the paper was about a girl scout leader in her Miami neighborhood. She totally ignored me and continued to point at the paper when I asked her to elaborate on this. This seemed weird since it seemed like a very personal paper; thinking of the situation now, I feel like someone else wrote this paper for her. However, she was hot and I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
I tried to get her to read her own work out loud and she refused, so I began to read it out loud. This is where I began to get annoyed since it was obvious that I was reading the paper to myself. It was poorly developed and obviously written towards the word count, so I stopped to ask her about Mrs Johnson-- the topic of the paper-- in hopes that the conversation would spark something that she felt would make this paper stronger. I asked "How would you ideally want Mrs Johnson to feel when she reads this? If you had to write a recommendation or a eulogy (God forbid) for her, does this do her justice?" The client had no answers, she had checked out and wanted to be done. The few times she said something, it was along the lines of "I just came to get my grammar checked". She also wanted my signature on the draft to show that she had taken the draft to the writing center. I continued to let her know that her punctuation and grammar were secondary issues in this paper and I could not ignore the bigger issues for the sake of her writing and my reputation.
Eventually she snatched her papers off the table and began to yell about how she was going to ACE to find a better tutor because she had to get home for Thanksgiving. I lol'd. I was never that aggressive but can remember having so little invested in my writing that I could've had a similar attitude back in my freshman year, I wonder how she'll turn out in the next 4 years.
I'm still trying to understand why her attractiveness was important! Lol. As I read your post I became more and more horrified, I am glad I haven't had an experience even close to this. I do think that it was important for you to go through that because it shows that not every session is going to go smoothly. I could tell off bat that the young lady was a freshman, hopefully she learns from this and will maybe think of you one day when she actually writes a paper for herself! I think you handled the situation well and am glad you didn't let her looks take advantage of your knowledge.
ReplyDeleteWhat a story! She was probably so insistent on your signature because her professor forced her to go to the reading and writing center. I had a student a while back who was from a class where her professor insisted they get their papers peer tutored, and she was a lot more engaging than this girl (but she also didn't take any notes so I have no idea if the session was helpful to her). Still, that really doesn't excuse this student's behavior. I'm glad you stood your ground and weren't willing to give in to her demands, and from what you said, you sound like you have a great tutoring style. I wish she could have learned something from you, but at least she learned that the reading and writing center isn't just a fix-up shop.
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