Being Too Helpful

Early in my tutoring work here at Miracosta in 2002, I was scheduled for an appointment with an ESL student who said she needed a lot of help with her grammar.  While that is what we studied together, I learned from “Maria” that sometimes the thing being studied and the success or failure of it are the least important or interesting features of the tutoring encounter.

While getting acquainted during our first session, Maria began telling me about how her husband, brothers, and others in her family were all giving her a bad time about coming back to school.  They felt that her place was in the home and that it was her duty to spend all her time with her husband and family.  At the time, I thought it was an hispanic cultural issue, but I have since talked with enough women in similar situations who were not Latinas to see it as a gender issue, and in a broader context.  Such conflicts can be wrenching, especially when they mark a departure from a long-established family routine.

Maria worked part-time during the day and took classes and came to tutoring in the evenings, which meant that often she would not get home until after 9:00 pm.  She told me that on some days she was spending more time with me in tutoring than she did with her husband, who, upon finding the house untidy and no dinner ready for him, often yelled at and cursed her, and sometimes worse.

Now ordinarily, I don’t particularly want to hear people’s sad tales.  They are none of my affair; there is nothing I can do about them; and listening to  them takes time away from the business of the hour.  But, having been trained to be a good listener and fascinated by this glimpse into an attractive woman’s domestic nightmare, I admit to spending more time than necessary in metaphorical hand-holding.  I was impressed that, for Maria, returning to school was an act of self-emancipation, and it cost her something every day.  If I recall, her sentences began to look more polished, but her freedom was the important thing; she may as well have been studying duck-walking instead of grammar for all the relevance it had to her new-found independence of spirit.

We worked together once or twice a week for several months. One evening she told me, laughing, that her husband couldn’t stand to hear my name mentioned.  I felt hairs stand up on the back of my neck.  She said that when she wanted to punish him back for his abuse of her, she would tell him that Scott said this, and Scott said that, and Scott is so nice, and Scott is so smart, until he started banging the doors and whacking things off the walls and shelves.  I said to her, “Are you crazy?  Cut that out!  You’re going to get us killed,” remembering from my time as a police officer how short the hop is from breaking things to breaking people.  But Maria had a wonderful, musical laugh; she said, “Ah, no worry, I can make him be nice.”

I haven’t seen her again since that semester, so I don’t know how the story turned out for her.  It has been suggested to me that my becoming too close to Maria, too familiar, was a mistake, and that by not maintaining the integrity of my role as tutor I enabled her to use my name as a stick to beat her husband with.  It is true that sometimes during long, repeated, or frequent sessions with a student something like a “relationship” can develop; we probably can agree that it is better to keep a professional distance in order to avoid uncomfortable situations.  In any case, I never forget that my favorite-pencil marks on a student’s paper are insignificant compared to the every-day marks being made by events on people’s lives.

- Scott H.

Impatience is Not a Virtue

Being a tutor could quite possibly be defined as, “One who patiently assist students in their educational endeavor to succeed”.  Unfortunately, during the initial period of my   tutoring career, my own personal definition of a tutor should have been, “One who impatiently waits for slow students to finish a lousy thought or bad essay, which should then be re-written by me”. I had no patience and would become frustrated with students who were slow in their writing and processing of information. Because of my lack of calm, I would do more than my share of writing for the student, which led me to take over and write for them.  There had been many cases when I had been known to write down not only short, brief notes and ideas, but long extended paragraphs as well.

In one particular instance, there was a student who was suffering from severe arthritis.  When he wrote, it would take an extremely long time for him to write information.  Because of the unbelievably long delay with our progress during sessions, I sometime found myself taking over his paper by writing EVERYTHING for him.  I became the author of his outlines and literally transcribed each of his essays.  Each session that followed, his paper gradually became my own (my thoughts, my ideas, and my voice).  One day, as I was thumbing through a thesaurus to replace a word he had chosen, I realized that this paper (along with countless others), should have had my name on it.   I had taken away his voice. I had stripped away his independence. Horrified by my realization, I quickly decided that in order to give these tools back to this student, I would have to wean him from my unbelievably impatient hold. I also knew that my overzealous nature had to be replaced with nurturing and encouraging assistance that would have to counteract all of the damage I had done.

Like clockwork, the following day he took out my essay and pushed it in front of me.   Hesitantly, I pushed the essay back to him.  This exchange went back and forth, until he finally said with tears in his eyes, “You’ve changed Deborah; you don’t want to help me anymore”.

  Wow! What had I done?  I spent the next thirty minutes trying to explain that in my feeble attempt to help by writing for him, I hurt him.  Over the following semesters, I worked hard to right my wrongs. Eventually, I devised a plan by which he would write outside of our sessions, and I would only need to proofread his work. This plan would prove successful because it took me out of the writing equation. Slowly, the student realized that he didn’t need me as much as he thought. I could see that by working outside each session, he quickly re-gained his independence and voice throughout his work. Additionally, I realized that if we had begun each session this way, there would have been little room for impatience.

As tutors we must realize first and foremost that the student’s work is just that—the student’s work.  Their papers do not belong to us, nor will we receive the grade for them.  We don’t want to be a crutch for the student by taking away their independence.  We must define ourselves as, “Those who patiently assist students in their educational endeavor to succeed”.

- Debi I.