Apprenticeship Session 7: 4/14/08

The session today was fairly standard, with a student coming in, having a paper reviewed, asking a few general questions and then leaving well before the end of the hour. So I mostly talked with the fellow and asked about his experience in the English 383 clss and what he had learned from it that was particularly helping him as a tutor.

I asked him what he had been expecting when he went into 383, and it turns out that his expectations were similar to mine. He was already a strong writer and expected a course that was basically about tutoring. To his surprise and to mine, English 383 has turned out to be a course much more about writing and thinking than about tutoring, though of course tutoring is a big part of it. I suppose I should have realized that a class with “Composition Theory” in the course name would be about composition theory.

In any case, from taking this class and attending these tutoring sessions I have learned a lot about writing and about tutoring. So much goes into the act of successfully tutoring someone that is behind the scenes, not clearly visible to the tutee. I think that my main challenge in this course has been to see the limitations in my definition of “tutor.” I have come to realize that to be a tutor is to be a lot of things all at once, and that it is a balance between acting as an authority figure and being conscious of the student’s ultimate ownership over their work. It would be easy to say “change this, that, and this,” but in the end these are not our papers that we are reviewing. They belong to the tutee, and I have come to realize that a tutor does not write the paper for the tutee, even in part. The tutee writes, and the tutor’s job is to help the words come.