I had a session with a client that had said she had seen several other tutors. She said she needed a computer to work on her assignment, so we looked around for one. Allt eh ones in the Writing Center were taken, so we ventured over to the Computer Lab next door. I asked her what progress she had made on her assignment. She not only had nothing, but she hadn’t picked a topic to write about. She had a choice of 10 prompts and an option to make one up. She debated over which topic she was going to write about for ten minutes while I went to the search engines on the online library page. I was getting way ahead of the game, but I didn’t want to tell her what to write. Honestly, I got bored waiting for her and decided to get ready to show her how to look for stuff online. She knew how to look for books online and do a basic Boolean search, but not a whole lot else. By a stroke of luck, I have been using the online library fairly extensively for the past 2 semesters and even took a class on how to do intensive searches on specific topics using the E-Library. Once she picked a topic I showed her a couple nifty tools, but she was very focused on writing down the sources I found. I wanted to tell her I was showing her how to find sources, not just examples of sources. She repeatedly said how she didn’t know what she wsa doing and how bad she was at writing, deciding what to write about and other writing-related things. I negated everything she said and told her writing is a process, and all of these things she thought she was bad at were in fact all a part of one big good product. I don’t think it helped much, because she kept beating herself up about it. And she said she is dropping out next semester. This was personally discouraging to me. How am I supposed to be enthusiastic about helping someone write better when they are leaving the university? Despite these discouraging words I continued to show her around the library catalog. At the end of the session, she said she was very grateful for my help! I was in shock. I did good? Because I showed her how to use a source? That’s all? I felt like she was giving me praise I did not earn, but nevertheless I enjoyed it. In fact, she said I was so helpful she wanted to work with me again. She asked me to reserve my next appointment for her. And I did.
