thomas leverett weblog: Writing tutors as marriage counselors

Friday, April 23, 2021

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.