The Manifestation of My Mental State as a Writing Center Tutor
Some mild but censored language is used throughout this article. All for humor, of course.
Resident writing center tutors can come at my inexperienced a— for how I carry myself within the walls of the Writing Center, but as for everyone else, I want you to know that being a writing center tutor isn't as easy as reading through some papers and fixing some grammatical errors.
When you're a tutor in training, after each session you have to write a reflection of a session you observed or a session that you partook in. I like using this space to constructively and subjectively reflect upon the day's tutoring experience. For example, one entry goes a little something like, "While I know I have so much to work on as a peer tutor (one being not having a literal brain shutdown during an online tutoring session), I’m just glad that I even have this opportunity to take this class and become a peer tutor." Another entry goes like, "That’s the one thing I’m worried about, like my day as well as my feelings (that are unrelated to the student or Writing Center) affecting the quality of the session. In other words, how do I better separate my personal emotional baggage of the day from the session itself?"
Tutoring seems like a relatively straightforward thing to do. You sit with another student and discuss ways they can improve their writing. So simple. If I was a f—ing robot that is.
As part of the human experience (at least that's who I believe my target audience is, I see you Zuckerberg. And even you Elon Musk. And you too Richard Branson, maybe you and that Bezos should have stayed in space—I've digressed), we carry with us our busyness, anxiety, and worries from the day. We unintentionally bring these things into spaces that don't warrant them. No matter how hard I try, I can't stop thinking about that one tenured professor who screwed me over and I can't, just for one moment, not think about how I've got to sort out my priorities immediately after my tutoring session is over.
A tutoring session is like the perfect battlefield for my "be in the moment" thoughts to clash with my "you've got a lot of sh— waiting for you after this is over" thoughts.
For me, being present during a tutoring session is one of the most difficult things to do. In order to help your peer, you have to resist the temptation to let the day's worries overcome you. Not being present makes it ten times more difficult to read papers, to provide rational feedback, and to properly understand a student's writing.
Perhaps I'm the only one who is flooded with insanely distracting thoughts from my day that derail my attention span and focus, but I honestly don't believe that for one second. I can't help but think that we all carry with us thoughts that intrude on our present moment.
I'm quite the over-thinker, and as you can imagine, that maybe doesn't bode well for a prospective writing center tutor. Thoughts about the student's writing overlaps with my thoughts on imposter syndrome and do I experience imposter syndrome? Oh crap, am I not good enough to be a writing center tutor? And then I'm thinking about how I'm actually not sure if the student's paper follows APA format because at this point I'd probably just look it up on the internet or in some handbook.
What I'm simply trying to say here is that people are thinking a lot of things in very short periods of time and when there is thirty minutes carved out of my day to read about a movie I've never even seen, you can bet that I might dissociate while I spiral into a rumination of things I wish I could change, but I simply can't. Like that thesis statement, man this student should really come to the Writing Center to have someone look at that thesis statement. Oh wait that's me, I'm supposed to be doing that now. No, I am doing that now. You see what my issue is?
I'm not saying that all tutors are like me (but I'm also not saying that what otherwise might not be true is true—did you follow me on that one?), but I think that we oftentimes carry too much baggage with us throughout the day, and even when we think we've left some of our baggage at the door, we've forgotten that the biggest and most unshakeable burden, that cannot be left at the door, is our mind.
Our mind never does what it's told to do. It literally has a mind of its own. Not to totally cite some Descartes-type wisdom right now, but our mind isn't something that we can just "leave at the door." Our mind is not just our brain, it's our personhood, our sense of self. It's where we store our everyday worries and it's where we fight for that thirty minutes of pure focus.
The mind is this beautiful gift that can easily become a trap for cyclic thoughts that insidiously return at a moment's notice. Despite knowing that this vicious cycle is fueled by increased worry and increased chaos, we still willingly feed the flames until we're sat in the Writing Center on the verge of a mental breakdown while reading an analysis of the Scream movies.
When in fact, I want to scream because I can't rally the thoughts in my own mind because I've completely lost my sense of self in a world that doesn't want you to find your sense of self. We live in a world that commodifies your sense of self until you no longer recognize who you are because you're scrolling like a humanistic robot on social media trying to find your worth; when really the worth you're trying to find is already instilled within you, yet it's buried by an overwhelming amount of expectations and responsibilities that force you to conform to perfectionism.
We live in a world where the internet messes with your mind (wow that sounds like some conspiracy theory type sh— right there) whether you openly admit it or not. We all fall victim to what technology has offered us. Until we break through the layers of this type of oppression, we'll forever be lost among word documents that reveal something deeper about our mental state rather than our tutoring abilities.
As part of the human experience (at least that's who I believe my target audience is, I see you Zuckerberg. And even you Elon Musk. And you too Richard Branson, maybe you and that Bezos should have stayed in space—I've digressed), we carry with us our busyness, anxiety, and worries from the day. We unintentionally bring these things into spaces that don't warrant them. No matter how hard I try, I can't stop thinking about that one tenured professor who screwed me over and I can't, just for one moment, not think about how I've got to sort out my priorities immediately after my tutoring session is over.
A tutoring session is like the perfect battlefield for my "be in the moment" thoughts to clash with my "you've got a lot of sh— waiting for you after this is over" thoughts.
For me, being present during a tutoring session is one of the most difficult things to do. In order to help your peer, you have to resist the temptation to let the day's worries overcome you. Not being present makes it ten times more difficult to read papers, to provide rational feedback, and to properly understand a student's writing.
Perhaps I'm the only one who is flooded with insanely distracting thoughts from my day that derail my attention span and focus, but I honestly don't believe that for one second. I can't help but think that we all carry with us thoughts that intrude on our present moment.
I'm quite the over-thinker, and as you can imagine, that maybe doesn't bode well for a prospective writing center tutor. Thoughts about the student's writing overlaps with my thoughts on imposter syndrome and do I experience imposter syndrome? Oh crap, am I not good enough to be a writing center tutor? And then I'm thinking about how I'm actually not sure if the student's paper follows APA format because at this point I'd probably just look it up on the internet or in some handbook.
What I'm simply trying to say here is that people are thinking a lot of things in very short periods of time and when there is thirty minutes carved out of my day to read about a movie I've never even seen, you can bet that I might dissociate while I spiral into a rumination of things I wish I could change, but I simply can't. Like that thesis statement, man this student should really come to the Writing Center to have someone look at that thesis statement. Oh wait that's me, I'm supposed to be doing that now. No, I am doing that now. You see what my issue is?
I'm not saying that all tutors are like me (but I'm also not saying that what otherwise might not be true is true—did you follow me on that one?), but I think that we oftentimes carry too much baggage with us throughout the day, and even when we think we've left some of our baggage at the door, we've forgotten that the biggest and most unshakeable burden, that cannot be left at the door, is our mind.
Our mind never does what it's told to do. It literally has a mind of its own. Not to totally cite some Descartes-type wisdom right now, but our mind isn't something that we can just "leave at the door." Our mind is not just our brain, it's our personhood, our sense of self. It's where we store our everyday worries and it's where we fight for that thirty minutes of pure focus.
The mind is this beautiful gift that can easily become a trap for cyclic thoughts that insidiously return at a moment's notice. Despite knowing that this vicious cycle is fueled by increased worry and increased chaos, we still willingly feed the flames until we're sat in the Writing Center on the verge of a mental breakdown while reading an analysis of the Scream movies.
When in fact, I want to scream because I can't rally the thoughts in my own mind because I've completely lost my sense of self in a world that doesn't want you to find your sense of self. We live in a world that commodifies your sense of self until you no longer recognize who you are because you're scrolling like a humanistic robot on social media trying to find your worth; when really the worth you're trying to find is already instilled within you, yet it's buried by an overwhelming amount of expectations and responsibilities that force you to conform to perfectionism.
We live in a world where the internet messes with your mind (wow that sounds like some conspiracy theory type sh— right there) whether you openly admit it or not. We all fall victim to what technology has offered us. Until we break through the layers of this type of oppression, we'll forever be lost among word documents that reveal something deeper about our mental state rather than our tutoring abilities.
Thank you for reading. I wrote this between the hours of 1 and 2:30 a.m. so please pardon me for any incoherent (but pretty darn interesting) ideas that I've presented here. As with most things that I write during the ungodly hours of the night, they usually don't get published here; but lucky for you, I wasn't going to let 1,000 words go to waste.
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