Real Tutoring

Mrs. Gibson helping Jaime, who recently
returned to Puerto Rico. We miss you, Jaime!

As a veteran teacher, I've always said that life's greatest lessons are played out in the classroom. That is equally true in the Writing Center, a mini version of the classroom. One of my latest life lessons is about the importance of being real (authentic, honest, concrete, genuine, sincere). There's a time to say "Good" when somebody passes by and off-handedly asks about your day. But there's also a time--more often than I'd realized before--when it's best to share from a place of deeper sincerity. It can feel uncomfortable at times, but it brings great reward in the end.

Now transfer that to the Writing Center, and you'll find a formula for success. It has been over two decades since I've been the student walking into a tutoring center to find help. But it hasn't been more than a few hours since I've had to ask somebody for help about something. So I can understand some of the mixed emotions students feel the first time they walk into our Center and nervously fumble through their backpacks looking for assignment sheets, books, and rough drafts. I understand the vulnerability involved when asking a complete stranger to critique the essay you spent all night laboring over. And I also know that even with a dozen years of teaching experience, I can still feel twinges of that nervous energy when I meet a student and am so hopeful for a productive session together.

So that is why I would summarize my tutoring style in one phrase: I'm me. Slightly wrong grammar in those two words, but they seem to fit. I can sometimes feel a temptation to come across as the expert, the "know-it-all," but what is most effective is to simply be myself--although a more professional version than the one you might meet on a lazy Saturday morning. I'm a happy person with a zeal for life,  a zeal for creative stories and provoking themes...even a zeal for a good sentence fragment. I'm realizing that in my field of teaching and writing, there is much more I don't know than what I do know. And that's ok. So when a student came two weeks ago for help with an APA paper, I didn't hesitate to tell her that I'd never written one before. But don't worry, I didn't end our time together. Instead, I took her through the learning process I use to gather new information (which happens to include my favorite website Purdue). Somehow, together, we managed to create in-text citations and a Reference page in less than an hour. We laughed several times about the craziness of learning this new system and enjoyed the journey together. This is just one example, but almost every session has moments where I demonstrate to the student how to verify information, such as using Dictionary.com on my phone to double check spelling of a word, phone a friend for help (such as when we called Lee who had just taught me a new procedure for analyzing), or access the wealth of knowledge available on the Internet.

There was a time when I felt bad if I didn't know something a student asked. Craziness. There is much I don't know, but I do know to be real and model the learning process. My confidence and ease come not because I have all the answers but simply because I know I don't. I can be myself and know that's good enough. The students follow that example--a greater lesson learned than any writing or editing skill.