by Kai Moskow

It has been increasingly obvious to me that a significant amount of students requesting tutoring from the writing center all have similar questions on writing. This might be due to the shift writing can undergo from being a very specific process to a more ambiguous one in higher-level courses. It can be sometimes frustrating to me to give advice to tutors, because I have a hard time telling if the advice or help I’m giving is resonating, being absorbed, or understood by the student, and I constantly have to ask if the student understand to confirm that I’m doing my job to the best of my ability, and saying those similar phrases over and over again can seem a bit too scripted to me.

After my initial experiences of tutoring, I don’t think my understanding of writing or the writing process has changed much. Teaching has become a more understandable concept to me, and I’m more confident in saying that I’m don’t explicitly enjoy it, but I can do it if I find myself in a situation in which it is necessary. I want to continue being a tutor for the writing center as I have now found a new confidence within myself of my writing abilities, and being paid to tutor during the Spring semester seems like a valuable form of employment to me.

Personally, I may have become more attuned to people’s thoughts during my work as a tutor, but I still have a long way to go. I also may have gotten slightly better at multitasking, as I am often looking at multiple things at once to tell the students my ideas using notes I have already written. During this entire next year, I plan to improve my empathetic and understanding skills, and, most importantly, my teamwork skills, as they are the most important skills in modern society and I am currently quite bad at teamwork, at least in my view.