My first tutoring job was when I was in my senior year of high school. I tutoring a 9th grader in Spanish. At the time I was in AP Spanish and president of Spanish Honors Society, and I was a very mediocre tutor to a very uninterested student.
One week, the student didn’t show up so I gave his mom a call.
“Oh! He didn’t tell you? Last week was our last session.”
And so ended my first tutoring job. All in all, it’s a weird chapter of my life that I frequently forget about, only to remember with a bit of vague sense of “Wasn’t that an odd thing.”
I got back into tutoring my junior year of undergrad, this time specifically a writing tutor and this time I was much better than mediocre.
I freaking love tutoring writing. I loved it at my undergrad, I loved it at my grad, and I loved it when I got to tutor one on one when teaching from middle school to high school to college.
At the writing center, we got students of all different majors and at all different places in their academic career. The only thing they really had in common was that none of them wanted to be at the writing center:
Students who were confident in their writing were at the writing center because their first year professor required it as part of the course work.
Students who were not confident in their writing were at the writing center out of desperation or frustration, or as a requirement for resubmitting a failed paper.
But over the course of our forty-five minute session, it was my goal to get them confident and excited about writing. And I don’t think I am being overly prideful when I say that I succeeded in most cases. Okay, maybe they weren’t necessarily excited, but I do think most of them left at least more optimistic than when they arrived, and that was enough.
Flighty Finch 