When I began as an undergraduate tutor at the Writing Centre in my third year at Laurier, my biggest anxiety was being taken seriously as an authority by my peers.
I was all too aware that I still looked like I belonged in high school, and I feared that students, especially upper-year students, would either doubt my advice or take an oppositional approach to the conversation as a result.
I was surprised that few students showed overt signs of questioning my right to be in the tutor's chair. Typically, students who make appointments are genuinely interested in any advice you can offer. Now, there were a handful of students who were reluctant to accept any constructive criticism of their work (and we should probably discuss strategies for approaching these situations in another blog post), but this resistance didn't seem to be related to how small I was or how young I looked; writing is intensely personal, and some writers are extremely sensitive to any reader response.
I learned fairly quickly that my professionalism during a session was helping me to step into that authoritative role. Appearing calm and in command of the session was key. Starting with the necessary paper work and then laying out how the session is going to run will help students see your connection to the Writing Centre as a professional institution as well as the fact that you're working according to a conscious methodology.
As I gained experience working with peers, my ability to garner respect grew more intuitive. I started feeling out how much I could commiserate with students during a session, throwing in personal anecdotes about my own struggles with assignments. (Keep in mind that it's very important not to commiserate about experiences with or opinions of professors)
I don't think I did ever encounter a student who overtly questioned my age and experience level, but in case anyone did my back-up plan was to make reference to my position as a third-year student as well as the selection and interview process for the Writing Centre tutors and, finally, to note the extensive training that we tutors are so lucky to receive. I might have also mentioned the experience that comes from having read so many student papers in the Writing Centre. I never had to test this response, so I'm not sure how well it would have gone over.
I encounter a shocked "You're so young!" reaction way more often now that I'm teaching undergraduate courses. My course is distance education, so my students never see my face unless they make an appointment to meet with me during my office hours. No matter how professionally I dress for these appointments, the students' reaction is inevitably one of shock. I find myself bracing for this response each time I'm waiting for a student to show up...
I respond to this reaction by calmly and modestly refering to my years of experience as a teacher of academic writing as well as the fact that I study the teaching of academic writing in my PhD work. Typically, once I begin discussing their paper or addressing their concerns, the students seem more at ease with my abilities.
Still, I wish, although it's horrible to say, that I could age a bit faster.
What are/were your anxieties about tutoring?
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Thanks for sharing your experience, Stephanie. Although I don't worry about whether I look my age (I think I do, unfortunately), I still sometimes feel the need to prove my "right to be in the tutor's chair," as you call it. It can be especially humbling to work with senior and graduate students who are writing highly specialized proposals and papers on topics I know very little about. After all, they are already becoming experts in their respective fields...why should they seek instruction and advice from me, an outsider?
I find it helpful to remind myself that my job is not to know more than the students I tutor, or to be an authoritative teacher to the students who will "receive" the knowledge I have to impart: my job is to give writing instruction. This takes the pressure off me because I realize that, while these students have specialized subject knowledge, I too have specialized knowledge--about features of academic writing, assignment types, the writing process, and grammar, for starters.
What's more, I have found that my "outsider status," the very thing that makes me feel unprepared to respond to specialized student writing, in fact makes me better prepared to give constructive feedback. Whereas an insider might become tangled up in content, I can see through the content to the structure and rhetorical moves in the writing. And when I can't find my way through a piece of student writing, I know that a discussion of reader expectations in academic writing might be a good starting point for the session!
When I do find myself in unfamiliar territory, for instance when faced with an unusual referencing question or a lesser known (to me) assignment type, I can usually get help from one of the many books on my shelf, an online resource, or someone else in the writing centre.
And here's a little piece of reassurance: I've never, ever been called stupid for not immediately answering a question. After all, if the person asking the question hasn't got a clue, who is he or she to criticize?
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