Murphy and DiPardo

I realized during class yesterday that I kind of contradicted myself. During Cara's presentation, I stated that there is profundity in the small things we do as tutors that actually can significantly affect people over time, step by step. Then, during Katie's discussion, I said that I thought it was a stretch how DiPardo said that words change conscious and, therefore, major aspects of life. I suppose that these two statements aren't necessarily contradictory, but I do feel that they need to be resolved. I think that the balance comes in recognizing that words and tutoring sessions do have the ability to change something in the tutee that could lead to a significant change within them, but the choice is ultimately up to them to let/make it happen or not. Not to get too philosophical or anything, but I think that's how it is with a lot of things: events, discussions, objects, people, and anything else can, if you let them, exert a great influence on your development. Some things inevitably change you, but with many things, you have to let them or make them change you.

To tie all that back into tutoring, I think that we can try to create an environment in which students can choose to make significant changes if they want. We can make the Writing Center a comfortable and friendly environment, and when we start tutoring, we can share large-scale skills and rules in the context of the specific paper, always trying to involve the students and make them think about the paper themselves in order to fix it. By doing these things, I think that students will have the opportunity to become better writers and better readers of their work. Perhaps they will then gain confidence that will help them in other parts of their lives, or perhaps they might discover that they love writing and want to change their major,... anything could happen. It almost seems like the butterfly effect: some small thing somewhere may effect some huge event somewhere else. I guess you never know.