Tutoring Session #2

In this session there was a male tutor and he had 2 students. This tutor thought himself as an expert, seeing as he thought his way was always best, and that whatever these writer wrote was wrong. Sitting in this session, I was very uneasy just by looking at his demeanor. He never smiled, or greeted the students pleasantly. He had a condesending look on his face the entire time, like the students were here wasting his and their time. The first thing he did was turn to the male student, and asked for his paper. Usually the tutor would read both papers first, and start working with the writer that had a more advanced paper, but I didn't find that to be a red flag. He never asked what was the paper about, or what he had to do, he just read it and started to give his comments. The first thing he asked the male writer was, "Where is your topic?" Before he could say anything, the tutor said that he sure he has in 'there somewhere', and time is pressing. He told the male writer to put a star next to anything he had a question about, while he worked with the other student.

This other student was a female, and what she was working on, I don't know because he never asked her. In these sessions I cannot speak, so I couldn't even ask her what was the assignment. For this part of the session, he was a little harsh towards the female writer. She would ask him a question, and he never gave concrete advice. He repeated what the text was saying, and dealt with Lower Order Concerns like grammar and spelling, when she was clearly asking for help with thing like: thesis, sentence structure and citation help. He would show her where the evidence is and then explain it, and have her write in his explanations. By this, I was horrified because I really couldn't understand how well he mus have thought this was going. When he went back to the other student, he didn't even give her an activity to do. He basically told her to write in all his ideas, and that was it for her. She left with this scowl on her face and was so upset, she didn't even stay until the session was over. Although he wasn't very hands on, he was more focused on the male student than the female student. And when all was said and done he turned to me and said, "If they just put in the stuff I tell them to, they will be fine." SIR WHAT?! This clearly wasn't a productive session, and both writers looked very unhappy when they left, and to be honest, I don't blame them.