Best Tutoring Session of the Summer:
Her name is Josie and she was analyzing the poem "My Papa's Waltz." My first goal each and every time I work with a student writer is to find out if they* know what they are saying in their paper. Josie knew: she was comparing the waltz itself to a roller-coaster. I was astounded a) with the certainty with which she announced her premise and b) the truth in her comparison. I saw it immediately: safety + danger, familiarity + fear, risk + excitement.
We went to work. Her paper announced her purpose as clearly as she did, but it did not hold tightly, only mentioning the roller-coaster two times in the following paragraphs. She wandered through memories and experiences of her own dances with her own father, through defences of the drunk father as a good man, and tossed in a mention of carnival rides in a couple of places. We discussed focus. She wanted to make sure her readers knew that this man was not a bad man. I told her that his character was not as important in this paper as making the connection between the experience in the poem and the experience of riding a roller-coaster: What is a roller-coaster like? + How does this dance exhibit those qualities despite having no gears or hills or that clicking sound that you hear while you go upupup to careen downward that first time? That is all you care about, I told her. That is all.
I told her that I loved her premise. I told her that I will never read that poem in quite the same way because of her insight. I said that as a reader, not a tutor or teacher--as an experiencer of literature and poetry and all that words can do to bring other people's lives into my own.
She worked and left and then worked some more on her own. She returned later that semester to say she got an A.
*I'm using this as a neutral pronoun because I honestly believe this will become a convention at some point in the future. English lacks a neutral pronoun, but English speakers have increasingly begun to use forms of they to refer to persons with unspecified genders. I'm cool with that. Some word needs to do that job.
Her name is Josie and she was analyzing the poem "My Papa's Waltz." My first goal each and every time I work with a student writer is to find out if they* know what they are saying in their paper. Josie knew: she was comparing the waltz itself to a roller-coaster. I was astounded a) with the certainty with which she announced her premise and b) the truth in her comparison. I saw it immediately: safety + danger, familiarity + fear, risk + excitement.
We went to work. Her paper announced her purpose as clearly as she did, but it did not hold tightly, only mentioning the roller-coaster two times in the following paragraphs. She wandered through memories and experiences of her own dances with her own father, through defences of the drunk father as a good man, and tossed in a mention of carnival rides in a couple of places. We discussed focus. She wanted to make sure her readers knew that this man was not a bad man. I told her that his character was not as important in this paper as making the connection between the experience in the poem and the experience of riding a roller-coaster: What is a roller-coaster like? + How does this dance exhibit those qualities despite having no gears or hills or that clicking sound that you hear while you go upupup to careen downward that first time? That is all you care about, I told her. That is all.
I told her that I loved her premise. I told her that I will never read that poem in quite the same way because of her insight. I said that as a reader, not a tutor or teacher--as an experiencer of literature and poetry and all that words can do to bring other people's lives into my own.
She worked and left and then worked some more on her own. She returned later that semester to say she got an A.
*I'm using this as a neutral pronoun because I honestly believe this will become a convention at some point in the future. English lacks a neutral pronoun, but English speakers have increasingly begun to use forms of they to refer to persons with unspecified genders. I'm cool with that. Some word needs to do that job.
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