I don’t think I come across all that smart in class. I tend to interject with little jokes—“what’s your favorite color?”, “I thought the book was too long,” “I don’t know how to read.” Really, I think the comments are funnier to me than anyone else there.
Since I was young, I’ve struggled in social situations. For whatever reason, I find my classes more suitable than an actual casual event to be “unserious” in—mostly because, to me, a party is a living nightmare; karaoke: hell on earth. Tunnel vision, sweaty palms, heart palpitations… it’s just so antagonizing.
I’m not totally sure of the reason I feel that way. One thing I’ve been considering is that that it may be because I can reasonably anticipate what reactions in a classroom, meeting, or other structured event will be. I don’t have to predict whether someone will say something mean to me—they’re at work, at school, or whatever professional situation they’re in, so they won’t. In other words, it’s a love for predictability—for certain rules-based consequences—that allow me to feel like myself.
When I joke with clients at the beginning of an appointment, my hope is that it will make them feel welcome—that they can come in and not feel pressured to be “perfect,” to mutually quip with me and tell me their concerns. I want to establish a rapport with my clients that can, in turn, lead to a productive working relationship where we delegate and consider what we’re hoping to get out of the tutoring session.
I assume in order to get something out of a tutoring session, you would also have something you’re wanting to get out of your assignment, your class, and your major. I would like to think that most clients have some sort of intrinsic motivation for what they do, even if they’re not totally sure about what that exactly “is.”
I want to help clients be able to find that motivation, and—if an assignment seems at odd with their motivations, to find that hidden intersection. Maybe it’s by covering compelling hooks, like showing how a seemingly unrelated experience actually offers a rich parallel in themes to the subject of their essay. Maybe it’s to simply explain what the purpose of an assignment is. Why are they writing a lab report? Why do they need to examine the rhetorical effectiveness of an advertisement? Why do they need to explain what an author is doing in line 16 of a poem they hate? Regardless—I think part of the role of the writing center is to not only explain how to write, but how to understand the purpose of what a client is trying to do.
When I was working on my MPhil in Digital Humanities, one thing we covered was the importance of collaboration. We learned about GitHub code repositories, co-authorship, all the expected “definitions” of what it meant to work alongside another person.
In reality, digital humanities is a remarkably isolated discipline. Departments tend to be critically underfunded, with perhaps one, maybe two dedicated faculty to them. In pursuing my current MA, I am one of only a couple of students who describe themselves as digital humanists. In my previous degree, I was with a cohort of roughly 20 people—except only a few of us were writing papers on actually similar topics, and, consequently, a lot of writing and thinking about our subject was done by ourselves.