You Don’t See Us Messing with Your Equations

I think that many of us have probably had the experience before of tutoring a student who has been sent to the writing center to be fixed. You know the scenario: a paper covered in red pen and little guidance to what the student had done wrong aside from the instructions to “go thee to the writing center.” This particular paper even had our phone number on it.

As a tutor this sort of thing always makes my skin crawl, because it cements the idea that the writing center is a place of remediation; that we fix papers; that we are the place where bad writers should go to see the error(s) of their ways. As an instructor, I am bothered by the lack of culpability involved. How is it someone else’s job to tell a student what they did wrong on your assignment? We’re not -mind readers -- well, I can’t vouch for the rest of the staff, but I’m not. I guess it comes down to the fact that writing is perhaps one of the few college-level skills that virtually every discipline must muck around with.

What do I mean by this? Whereas as a writing/literature/women’s studies instructor you wouldn’t see me messing around with mathematical equations (let’s face it- stereotypes exist for a reason), writing is really unavoidable in most college classes. Maybe some professors do not feel that they have the background to teach students how to write a college-level paper, or do not think it is their job, so they send these students to us. However, rather than getting enraged and copping an attitude in front of a student who assuredly already feels pretty bad about himself in relation to this paper, I tried to consider it a teachable moment. Optimistically looking at the situation, I told myself that although I might not like the circumstances that sent the student to us/me, he might not have come otherwise.

So what was so glaringly abhorrent about this student’s paper? Nothing really. Like many inexperienced writers he had trouble presenting a clear thesis statement, and also like may freshman writers, that thesis statement was buried in his conclusion. Could this student’s instructor have easily pointed this out to him? Probably, but maybe I should give him/her the benefit of the doubt, because although you will never see me messing around with proofs or differential equations, most professors must muck around with writing, and although we might not like the message it sends when they tell their students to come to us to be fixed, at least they’re then coming to us. Maybe we can then turn a negative into a positive and shift focus from the paper to the writer.