Session observation

Last week I observed one of Meghan's sessions. Unfortunately for Meghan, it seemed to be such an agonizing session! The tutee just didn't seem to care at all, didn't voice any opinions, and was just completely indifferent and mostly silent. Meghan tried so hard to get him to talk! I admired how she used various methods and kept changing her tactic to try to get this tutee involved, but he just wasn't cooperating. Not that he was actively resistant -- he just didn't do anything.

He had an assignment to write a literary analysis paper and said that he didn't know where to start or how to write this kind of paper. He had brought the text he was supposed to analyze, so Meghan tried to get him involved by asking him questions about the text. She started with questions like "Why did you think the author decided to do that?" -- he didn't know -- and then she moved to more general questions like "Did you like this part?" -- and he still didn't know!

It seemed like Meghan was trying to come at the issue from so many different angles, trying to get the student engaged and trying to find something that would get him to express an opinion or even a little bit of interest, but he wasn't having it. She tried to move onto an even more general topic by asking him what books he liked, if there was anything he'd read in high school (he was a freshman) that interested him. He said he'd liked Brave New World, and Meghan asked him what he liked about it, what themes he saw in it. He said he didn't know... "I don't like to read."

At this point I was feeling so badly for Meghan because I think she's a great tutor and she was trying so hard to get this student involved! I felt like we were in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" -- where Bartleby would say "I would prefer not to," this tutee said "I don't know."

Meghan moved on to give some suggestions to the student for how to start this kind of a paper, how to look for themes in a text. The student was a kinesiology major so Meghan even tried to apply literary analysis to his field, to get him interested, by saying that the sciences require logical thinking, which is also true of analyzing a text. Meghan showed the student how to access the reference databases to search for secondary sources, and encouraged him to read some scholarly essays about the text he had to analyze, to get ideas about what other people thought about this text. She encouraged him to come back to the writing center when he had a draft.

The student asked for a required visit slip and left. As he walked out I thought that I had possibly never seen a tutee so indifferent! Sure, I get some tutees who say they hate writing/reading, but at least they have an opinion. This student didn't want to express any opinions, really.

What to do with a tutee who is so completely ambivalent? I thought that Meghan's methods were great -- she tried really hard to find something that the student could connect to, something that would serve as a jumping-off point to get him talking. I feel that, in most cases, this would be a great method to use. It was unfortunate that this student wasn't responsive to it!