Confessions of a Writing Center Tutor

Stephen North once wrote:

"Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing."

In his article "The Idea of a Writing Center" (1984), North reviewed the typical definitions of writing centers by the outsiders and eventually, gave his own meaning. It may seem that in the writing center, our job is to help students produce their best work yet and move on to the next writing. No. As Stephen North once wrote and many agree, a writing center tutor must act as merely a guide to help students become more independent writers to soon not require the need of a "tutor".

I've already written extensively here about my experience getting hired into the LaGuardia Community College Writing Center. As a tutor there, for many years, I have been on a roller coaster ride and learned a lot on the job.

Bert Eisenstadt, my mentor and the director of the LaGCC Writing Center, once described the "job description" of a writing center as someone who does exactly what the student needs. If the student wants to focus on grammar, then the tutor must oblige. If the student wants feedback on his or her paper, the tutor must oblige. However, it is very important to know where to draw the line between doing what the student wants and following the writing center guidelines ethically. A writing center tutor cannot in any way, write the paper for the student. Sometimes, it is easy to see what is clearly ethical and what is not. However, most of the times, it is not. 

My Writing Center Tutoring Theory

"The most basic rule of tutoring is to trust the judgment of the students in their writing as writers." I once wrote this in a paper in graduate school responding to the "Tutors' Ideals and Practices" article by David C. Fletcher. The tutor must act as a guide to help students think, brainstorm, write, revise and edit. Nothing more, nothing less. The tutor must guide students to come to a point where they do not depend on or need the tutor any longer. Why is this so hard to grasp or internalize? Well, according to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most teachers like to remain in power. They like to be the one the student turns to every step of the way. Similarly, tutors must like remaining in power and being the ones that the student turns to. Guess what? They know how to write well. They know exactly how to help students get an A on a paper.

However, though it might seem as a shock to many, school is not the place to come to accumulate "A"s and feel superior and accomplished. At least that’s my opinion, especially when it comes to writing. School, a classroom, a tutoring session is the place for learning. For improving. If a doctorate student in Medical school learned how to operate on a person and get an A on a paper written about that operation is not necessarily the best future doctor. Do you see where I'm going with this? 

One of my students recently proclaimed to me during a tutoring session: "this is exactly what I needed. I needed someone to help me think out loud and organize my ideas." Hey, I couldn't agree more! She is a brilliant and intelligent person on her own, English may be her second language but she knows exactly how to think critically about a subject and develop her ideas. She just needs some guidance! I've worked with her for about 3 months now and I can say confidently that she has truly matured as a writer. When she's given an essay prompt, she knows how to organize her thoughts and how to develop them. It is not my place to assume that this is entirely because of my hard work but I suspect the fact that we're meeting less and less is because she needs my help less and less, bam: proof that she is improving as a writer. She says she will need my help next semester when she takes another writing class but somehow I doubt that. Perhaps she will need the occasional feedback and the eyes of another to read her work and that is something that I, too, need when I'm trying to produce my best work. And this is where I will have to make sure the kind of feedback I give her are merely questions I ask of her like: "what did you mean here when you mentioned this idea?" or "Can you tell me a bit more about this particular example? It's a big vague." or "What is your main point in this body paragraph?" These questions are supposed to help her understand that as a reader, I cannot exactly verify her points and need her to clarify.

This brings me back to when I was in high school and I would ask my father or sister to "read over" my work and all they can do is obsessively cross out sentences and write their own. "It sounds better like this" is what they would say. I'm sure they had their best intentions in mind but I felt like it was no longer my paper or my writing. It felt foreign. And separate. So I would do the only logical thing and cross out their sentences, replace them with mine and submit the essay as it was. I didn't score that high on those papers necessarily but somehow it felt better. I guess I didn't have a writing center tutor then, which reminds me, writing centers should be a thing in high school too! 

Thus, the writing center tutoring should only involve a tutor helping a tutee organize his or her thoughts and give feedback by asking questions along the writing process. Most tutors know this after years of working at the writing center, so why do we have so many unsatisfied students? In my opinion, it is because most tutors know what to do but they are not motivated to do it. Tutoring is one of the lowest paying jobs! When someone wants to make some quick money, he or she tutors but I don’t see many people who dream of being a writing center tutor or writing consultant or writing specialist as an aspiration or “end goal”. Perhaps this is where writing center scholarship should be directed.