After Post Notes
February 2020
To prepare for a tutoring staff training, we were asked to read Andrea Lunsford’s “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center” and to respond to our previous assignment about how we make noise in the FIT Writing Studio. I chose to discuss two previous teaching experiences in which I identified Lunsford’s definitions of tutoring storehouses and garret centers.
“The [Writing Center] as Storehouse operates as [an] information station or storehouse, prescribing and handing out skills and strategies to individual learners . . . [Garret Centers] see knowledge as interior, as inside the student, and the writing center’s job as helping students get in touch with this knowledge . . . ”
— Andrea Lunsford, "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center"
At the FIT Writing Studio, we do not hand out knowledge. We do not force discipline. Educators sometimes view writing as purely functional. They have preconceived opinions of what writing should be: standardized format, analytical tone. Producing a collaborative environment is difficult in a subject area that is traditionally non-creative. However, within intimate sessions, goals are clearly defined and my real job is to help the writer think out loud. I ask what the student thinks before I say what I think. Sometimes, I'm not sure what to say, but the writer and I brainstorm together. We have conversations. We read out loud together and help each other understand what the writer wants to communicate. Some professors may believe that what we do is fix writing. I believe what I do is learn alongside the writer how to most effectively use our voices.
I MAKE NOISE, TOO
Kumon is a tutoring chain in which “children improve their skills in a subject by completing worksheets of increasing difficulty, led by a special instructor.” Parents force their children to attend Kumon several days a week after school and/or weekends to get ahead in class. High school students sit silently at a grading table by the only exit. A digital clock with red flashing digits rests above the door. As young students between 5 and 16 years old enter the “tutoring” center, a high school age secretary hands them a manila folder and ushers them to the rows of folding chairs and tables. The students face a blank wall and one fake potted plant. Parents sit outside, staring at their iPhones, waiting to take their kid to the next tennis and karate lessons. The room is silent.
Kumon is, from my experience tutoring there, a Storehouse: “control resides in the tutor or center staff, the possessors of information, the currency of the Academy.” Workbooks of varying degrees in both Mathematics and English are checked in red ink and the student must fix everything at their table before they are permitted to leave. Essentially, they are doing extra homework and not receiving any help to understand what they must actually learn in class. Us student “tutors,” hold the power of the red pen. We carry the correct answers in our stacks of grade books and never rise to meet the needs of the student. We meet the needs of the administrator, counting enrollment fees in the back room and parading for the parents.
Within the dojang (karate school), we barely do better. The dojang is a Garret Center: it seems to “invest power and control in the individual student know-er” yet “such control is often appropriated by the tutor.” The student has the power within themselves, only when we demand push-ups for every mistake they make. We instructors pride ourselves in teaching discipline, I believe, over the students own confidence. Maybe that isn't the intention, but even karate masters fall off the right path sometimes.
I admit, I may be biased and persuaded by the few karate students I instructed at both the dojang and Kumon. But, like my previous post “I Make Noise,” I am disappointed in the overuse of the red pen and hypocrisy of grammar-phobia.