I love being a tutor

My day job is at a local community college as a writing tutor, or writing consultant as we've recently changed our title to. It's much snazzier and doesn't have the same negative connotation that the word “tutor” can often carry. I love my day job. 

I'm also a mom as I've mentioned in previous posts. My children are 8 and 10. Often people are startled by the fact that both of my children frequently complete works of writing here at home. My children have been creating pieces of writing from the time they started being able to write groups of words together to form sentences. We do momma school during the summer, which normally includes several papers. When my children have behaviral issues, as all children do, a normal part of their punishment is to write a paper about the issue or a letter if their behavior impacted someone such as a teacher. 

This week my little padawan made some poor choices at school. As a result, he was told to write a letter to his teacher. I know what you're thinking; this practice is going to make my children hate writing. I disagree. In fact, the actions of my children also disagree with that statement. November is just around the corner, and this year both of my children are excited for National Novel Writing Month's Young Writer's program or NaNoWriMo's YWP. I do not think my children would be so excited for the challenge of writing a short story and novelette if they hated writing.

My children don't just get to scribble out a rough when I've given them an assignment though, be it part of momma school or as part of a punishment. No, my children have to produce at least one rough draft and work with a tutor to develop that draft. Good thing they have a tutor living in the next room. My children have also been having writing sessions for as long as they've been writing.

I've had other parents remark that it must be very difficult to be my own children's writing tutor. It might be one day. Right now though, it's not, and I contribute that to how I handle sessions with my children. I do not normally work with young children. In fact, I have actually turned down requests from other people asking me to work with their children. My youngest student at work is normally 16. The only younger writers I have ever worked with have been my own kids. So how do I change my tutoring style to accommodate my young children?


The short answer is I don't.

I might adjust the levels of concerns to accommodate where they are as writers, but I'd do the same thing for my college writers. When I first started, I did shorter sessions with my children than I would at work, but I've even decided that practice was unnecessary. Our normal session time at work is 30 to 45 minutes. My son's session tonight was 45 minutes. He'll have several 45 minute sessions this weekend before his letter is finished. 

Tonight we focused on organizational issues because his letter was all over the place. his writing was also rather redundant as he repeated the same basic details and added far too many "very"s in there to hit his required page length. Yeah, guess what the average college student does when they have an assignment they don't want to do with a length requirement they have to hit? Guess what I do in the same situation?


My son is a writer, and there is no reason to treat him like anything else. During our session, my son and I both had pens. Guess which pen was used the most? It wasn't mine.


I encouraged my son to read his rough draft to me. My son works best when he reads the paper to me. It's the opposite of how both me and my daughter do things. He knew to read slowly. He knew I'd be circling things on his paper as we went. He knew we'd talk about each thing I marked. He knew I'd want to talk about the big stuff (or the hard stuff as he calls it) before we looked at other things. He also knew that it was okay for him to stop reading to ask a question.

My eight-year-old child stopped reading a letter he didn't want to write to ask me to remind him what the rule for commas was when you used a conjunction because he "heard a pause" when he was reading.


What my son had to write was not something fun. One of the main reasons he had to write the letter was because we knew that the writing of the letter would force him to slow his racing eight-year-old thoughts down to really think about his behavior. That is not something fun to write. That sucks to write.

My son was smiling for the first time since getting in trouble because he knew he was having a productive session, and he felt accomplished. He wasn't proud of his actions this week. He wasn't proud that he had to write about them. He was proud that he could communicate to his teacher how much he regretted his behavior and how he planned to do things differently. My son was proud that we were working to make those jumbled up eight-year-old thoughts into something that made sense to him when he read it to me.

Will this letter be perfect? No. Will this letter be something written on the academic level of a college student? No. He's eight. It'll be written on the academic level of an eight-year-old, who took the time to revise.


My children will grow up to be writers because I've always treated them like writers. And even if the only things my son ever writes is Star Wars fanfiction, assigned papers, and apology letters, I know I'm giving him the tools to be the best writer he can strive to be.