Pulling teeth

At 11:30 a.m. this morning, I received my first "weekly." The weeklies are different from the walk-ins at the tutoring lab. The walk-ins come in, grab an available tutor, and torture the tutor for one hour. The walk-ins can make another appointment if they so choose with that particular tutor, or they can get another tutor. The weeklies, on the other hand, come in every week at the same time to torture their assigned tutor. I use "torture" lovingly, of course. Perhaps it's not so much torture as it is ... hmm ... no, it's torture.

There are the few perfectly lovely students, of course; I don't want to imply that all the people coming in for help only offer a time of agonizing pain and suffering--that's simply not true. There are the few who instantly get the point the tutor is trying to make, who manage to use their new-found knowledge to sculpt not only an amazing thesis, but delightful topic sentences as well, and who part ways at the end of the hour with a wide smile and a "have a great week!"

But these particular students are few and far between, and I seriously doubted my tutoring abilities this morning when I was given a weekly who somehow managed to seemingly cuddle with me, leaning on my shoulder at one point, with bad breath and a stubborn inability to understand anything I was trying to say. This was further compounded by the added stress of only having a half an hour instead of the full hour. When he left, I learned that he wanted to switch tutors; I apparently wasn't good enough.

The head tutor did reassure me, however, saying that that particular student was odd, he could sense it when the guy came in, but I was the only available tutor and I did fine. It wasn't me, he said. Which I seriously continued to doubt, especially when my next student, a walk-in, showed me a nearly incoherent essay with no visible thesis and phrases like "individual innocuous" splattered throughout.

So, after the equivalent of pulling five teeth (also equivalent to one and a half hours), we managed to come up with a thesis, and we started on the topic sentences. We hadn't even touched his grammar.

At 2 p.m., my shift ended and I finally ran away, completely drained of all energy and convinced that I was a failure. Could I quit? I thought, hurrying up the stairs to my Egyptian art class. Maybe I'll give it one more day. Maybe I'm not cut out to be a tutor. Oddly enough, there was no panic, simply a deep-seated weariness. Another writing tutor had warned me about this weariness--she'd said that the trick is to help them while not becoming completely drained.

Maybe I just need a little time to figure out how to do that.

UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) was a complete 180 from yesterday (when the above post was written), since I only had one student and I was able to successfully help her without coming away from the session feeling like a smushed pile of silly putty. That was nice.