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Talking in the Middle: Why Writing Tutors need Writers

Talking in the Middle: Why Writing Tutors need Writers

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Today was frustrating. The English 030 class I’m interning in started workshops, and 95% of the time I felt like the head teacher and myself were the only ones talking and giving advice. Why wouldn’t the others speak up? We were practically the same age as them, and the 030 class is pass/fail, not graded. Workshops don’t have right or wrong answers! Yet still only three of the nine students said something- and two out of those three were having their own projects worked on.

So, yes, today was frustrating. Near the end, though, something amazing happened. The head teacher asked the last student whose project we had been critiquing if our thoughts had helped, and he said yes, they had. By us asking him questions on what he wanted to do, what the criteria for his project was, and helping him to sort out the themes or “thesis” of the project, without ever specifically telling him what and what not to do, he had gotten to explore his project in more detail and had come to new conclusions. And now here I sit in the library, typing up this blog post for the gallery walk on Wednesday, and I think “Wow. We may be future teachers, but all we’re really doing right now is tutoring.” Muriel Harris got it right when she said:

“Most students come to writing centers because they are required to, but even so, students leave feeling that the tutorial has been a beneficial experience (p. 3).”
And you know something else? I think we tutors also are benefited from the experience. Teaching is HARD. Most of the time during our first years in K-12 schools (secondary schools especially) our students aren’t going to want to speak up. They’re going to sit there while we try to teach them what they need to know and not join in during discussions. They won’t listen to what we have to say about their papers in our comments. So this thing we have now, this interning gig? It’s prepping us for The Real Teaching Experience, yeah, but it’s also giving us that little smile and nod at the end of the day, where our students say “Yeah, that helped” and thank us for our time. It’s a valuable experience to keep in mind for when things get tough, to remind us why it is we wanted to start teaching and to remind us how we can connect with our students to make everyone’s time worthwhile.
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