What I Do in the Writing Center: A First-Person Account of a Long Career in College Tutoring

What I Do in the Writing Center: A First-Person Account of a Long Career in College Tutoring

by David R. Couric

“I can’t be a tutor,” my wife says, “because I’m just going to correct the student’s paper.” Working around tutors, but not as a tutor, at a college for many years has taught her a valuable lesson in tutoring: Don’t just correct a student’s work— that’s not going to help the student in the long term. In the lingo of what is called “best practices,” minimalism in tutoring is the way to go.

Doing as little as possible and still helping the students may be counterintuitive, but a good tutor has to be committed to minimalism in some sense and in general. Of course, there are some exceptions to the general rule, but the theory is that finding creative ways of prompting students to do it on their own with as much of a hands-off approach as possible will result in student success over the long run. Sometimes, though, students need not only to be told something but also to be shown exactly how to do it. In practice, the exceptions will present themselves in the flesh, and the hope is that the next time it will be different because they will have learned something. The bottom line is that tutoring has to be student-centric, just as a business has to be customer-centric.

Many times over the years, students have stopped me and asked point blank, “Do you teach?” Or they might say, “You should do this as a teacher” or something to that effect. My reply will always contain the lesson on the distinction between teaching and tutoring. I try to make it clear to them by giving the illustration of a doctor and the patients. No one would ask a doctor why they don’t see groups of patients at a time. It has to be one at a time because each individual has specific needs that have to be diagnosed separately and then each given a prescription accordingly. It’s the same with a tutor.

The theory in best practices of writing tutoring is to start with the higher-order things, which would be the organizing of ideas and content rather than the lower-order things such as formatting style and editing grammar. In a way, the process is the reverse of how students used to learn the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, (in that order) starting with elementary school age. While classical education moved from lower order to higher order, tutoring attempts to reverse the order in reviewing a student’s writing.

If education were done as it was classically, there would be much less need to dwell on lower-order issues. That is not where tutors find themselves in today’s modern educational world. About the time elementary schools quit being called grammar schools, many years ago, students started learning less and less grammar. So many students have to make up for that loss in the first year of college, and that’s one of the job descriptions of tutors. Just as math students simply cannot move up to algebra without mastering arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percents), so writing (rhetoric) students are missing something foundational without first mastering grammar and logic because grammar is the arithmetic of writing.

In a sense, what I do is best summed up by a motto that the Mountain View student activities office used for many years: "Empowering students for success, one life at a time," which I think could have been the tutoring mission statement in a nutshell. The greatest compliment I ever received from a student came just recently when a student had a unique answer to her own question of why she was in the writing center that day. She mentioned after a first consultation that she now knew why she was sent to me to get help. I took the bait and asked directly, “So why is that?” I had never heard the answer she gave, in all my 35 years of experience here: “Because you love what you do.” What do I do in the writing center? I pour my heart and soul into it, into the students.

David R. Couric (couric@dcccd.edu) is retired from Dallas College at Mountain View with 35 years of experience in the higher-education field there, including a decade in the Ink Spot Academic Center for Writing (2011-21). He still works part time as an academic coach (writing tutor) in the Learning Commons.