thomas leverett weblog

Writing tutors as marriage counselors

There are several ways writing tutors are like marriage counselors. Before you throw this away, hear me out. Some of us have had good or bad experiences with marriage counselors; some have had none. It doesn't matter. Imagine yourself in the marriage counselor's seat and someone walks in.

The primary consideration here I think is that the person who walks in wanted to make it work. They wanted to make it work when they married, and most likely though not definitely they still do. The unseen partner may or may not to still make it work. 

Here is the similarity: Both the writing student and the teacher probably want to make it work. The teacher is in the business of wanting to make it work, though may have already given up on this particular student, or got mad for some reason entirely independent of writing. But in its essence, the student-teacher relationship is like that of married partners; both want it to work, and often fail because of poor communication, lack of skills in discerning partner's needs, etc.

So you start out getting the student to admit that they want to make it, want to learn and produce what will be well received and even what will produce an A. Most likely this student wants all this though may not want to do the necessary work, or be able to do the necessary work. In this way marriage counseling and tutoring are still similar. One big difference arises, though: the teacher has much more power in this relationship than the student; unlike the marriage, where we are dealing with two (presumably) equal partners, in this case there is no equality. The teacher has communicated needs: what is necessary to get a good grade. Sometimes these are unspoken and must be inferred from the situation. Sometimes they are right out in the prompt and, if you have seen these, we know that all tutoring sessions are triangulated this way: there's the student, the teacher, and the prompt (the expectations). 

There is one important thing that I learned from marriage counseling which I'd like to share. I had two young children and the counseling failed, tragically, because my first wife simply didn't want to keep it going. So I'll be the first to admit that sometimes our habits of thinking about each other are too strong to overcome, and we can't recapture that original desire to make it work that is necessary to work through the problems in communicating, etc.

But the powerful operating words in that paragraph are "habits of thinking." A habit is powerful enough to draw you back to it even when you intend to change your mind. So if a student is in the habit of thinking "I can't write" and you tell them they can, they may be ok for the afternoon but will inevitably go back to their habitual way of thinking after you are long gone. In the same way if you teach them something like "you've got to mind the sentence that you put in the place of the thesis," they may hear you and understand you, but if you haven't managed to change their habitual way of thinking, they won't immediately incorporate that into their system. And it's not because they haven't been told. It's because we're dealing with habits here, and habits are hard to break.

We can then look at a tutoring session as like a counseling session where we, tutor and student, are both on the same side in trying to make it work, and in realizing that the first step will be to alter some damaging habits that have held the student back. The knowledge alone of how to produce a good essay, or whatever, will not be enough. The ultimate concern is the student's system, i.e. what actually happens when the student is alone writing late at night. The habitual patterns of creating won't change themselves just because the student has new knowledge. If we can't turn that knowledge into action then we haven't changed anything, except maybe one assignment.

posted by tom @ 8:45 AM 0 comments

they shoot wild horses don't they?

The following story says a lot about how incredible it is to live way up here high in the mountains of southern New Mexico, kind of the southernmost point of the Rockies.

There have been lots of deer and elk, and they are healthy. The elk sometimes are in herds of a dozen, two dozen, and they are quite beautiful. I'm sure some people shoot them but they still manage to do ok.

But it's the wild horses that have really struck my eye. They started out in the Apache Reservation, north of here, a wide swath of beautiful mountains, and the Apache left them alone and they thrived. Now purists will jump on my word "wild" since technically a wild horse would be one that never had domesticated blood at all - never escaped from any captivity, it or any of its ancestors. But that rules out every horse in North America. So I'll take a shortcut and say these are wilder than most - they've lived on the Apache lands for several generations, and though they get domesticated mares to sneak out and be with them, they are pretty well used to the wild life.

They do pretty well, and that's why they have crossed the border into National Forest which surrounds our village. All this land is forested, over 8,000 feet, but the grass is good and the ability to hide is excellent. They leave us alone and we leave them alone. We admire their horse-god-like beauty and their freedom. Because they are in herds, they don't seem to fear the bear or the cats. Their herds number anywhere from three to eight; at ten or more they start running each other off, splitting, looking for new territory. We see them on the highway often, grazing but being wary.

So, then, four of them wander into the village. The village is at 8700 feet and has a single highway; the schools and the parks are all along that highway. These four are eating the grasses at the schools and the parks. Some people were quick to say: that's trouble. Somebody's going to get hurt. They'll trample a kid, or hit a car, or somebody will try to touch them.

But nobody did anything. I kind of waited - my mistake. Maybe I could have taken my banjo out there or something. But to me the wise thing to do would be to run them off with annoying noise. It would bother people but it would work. And one would have to do it repeatedly until they learned. But this never happened.

Instead, one night somebody just shot all four of them, and left them there. They had to find someone to pick them up and haul them off, but they did; they have people who do stuff like that. In fact we have car accidents involving deer and elk all the time, and the result is, somebody always has to haul off a carcass. They generally know what can be done with them.

And then, the most incredible news of all: there wasn't much of a fuss about it. Maybe it's happened before. Maybe it was just as well, since somebody was going to get hurt. Maybe a lot of people secretly liked what that guy did, and didn't want to say a whole lot, but the less the better, just get it behind us and move on.

I am still regretting not being a town leader, and getting out there with a bullhorn. But I just moved here a few years ago, and I don't feel like a town leader. I'm still watching.

One thing is that it's theoretically possible to come, rope the horses, and ride them off into the sunset. Any takers? There are plenty of them left. And they're beautiful.

posted by tom @ 8:39 PM 1 comments