On Blogging, Minimalist Tutoring, and Spectrum Awareness

After reading through the blog entries by Rachel, Matt, and Scott, I felt a little insecure about the quality of my past and future entries. I was also inspired to be a little bit more assertive with my voice, and — from Scott’s humorous pop culture references — to be a little bit more freely associative. Here’s to working on those things.

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A dear friend from high school gifted me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita upon our graduation in 2012. I’ve always been a curious guy, and we often lost a few hours at night talking spirituality and the histories of religion. I’d been interested in Eastern philosophy for a time, and my friend opening up a conversation between myself and the Gita was the gateway to what is now a passing interest of mine, studying spirituality casually. That’s how I introduced myself to Buddhism, the origin of the following maxim: “How you do one thing is how you do all things.” I’ve been thinking about that lately, especially in relation to writing centers, and, specifically, tutoring.

One of my largest anxieties right now is that I’ve jumped on the tutoring train late. While I’m still undecided as to whether or not I want to pursue education, I at least want to see if I enjoy it — but I have yet to actually tutor anyone or be in a position of authority within an educational setting, in stark contrast to many of the people in this class. With my lack of experience in mind, then, you might be able to understand my hesitation — regarding directive teaching methods, that greenness of mine leaves me feeling slightly uncomfortable about assuming a position of authority. Additionally, I’m not a person that feels necessarily comfortable lording power over others. I’ve been so enamored with the teaching styles I’ve encountered at UNL — dialogue-based, free-roaming, and problem-posing, to name a few.

As I set out to complete the readings for the week, I settled on Brooks’ Minimalist Tutoring before the others, and halfway through I began thinking the methods it dictates could settle my anxieties about tutoring. Its easily digestible reminders about serving writers in better ways than just as “editors,” its idealized viewpoint and emphasis that nondirective tutoring enables the creation of, as North would say, “better writers, not better writing,” got me thinking that I could ease into tutoring by focusing on the conversation at hand, by functioning as a friend willing to generate ideas through dialogue, instead of as a “right answer” machine, like some authoritative storehouse of information. As a fan of minimalism and dialoguing anyways, and keeping in mind that “how I do one thing is how I do all of them,” I certainly liked how nondirective tutoring methods hypothetically mesh with my own laid-back personality.

But by the end of the article I was a bit mystified. I was especially confused by Brooks adamantly calling for mirroring students’ bad body language, and even acting bored, if they aren’t responding to the session well — that sort of behavior seems wildly immature to me, and frankly, I lost confidence in the credibility of those same statements I had previously been willing to accept. The complementary and complicating readings, by Shanoon & Burns and Carino, further convinced me of the necessity of employing directive methods when tutoring, as well as the aimlessness that nondirective teaching might lead to. I especially liked the spectrum as described at the end of the Carino piece, where more student knowledge leads to more nondirective methods, and less student knowledge about the subject leads to more directive methods.

My “Efficiency in Government” class, led by the erudite Prof. Hayden, stresses the importance of context when analyzing policy. So, perhaps basing tutoring methods off of a spectrum is a much more flexible and accommodating way to go about assessing how best to approach a given tutee. During one of my sit-downs with the writing center this week, the tutor I sat in on, Kate, set out to help a graduate student go over essays he needed to write for tax and accounting analysis. She employed both directive and nondirective methods, and both were essential in the contexts the student needed; she provided corrections for grammar, organization, and general tonal issues, but Kate also phrased her corrections so that she was more of a guiding hand than an authoritative one, and she probed her tutee with gentle questions that enabled him to spot and correct himself by the end of the session.