I most fear that I will encounter a student that is smarter than me or who has a paper about something I know nothing about. I dread the day that a student brings me a paper that is over my head to the point that I may not even understand it. Certainly there are subject areas in which I am no expert and I worry that I will not be able to help a student who brings me a paper on a topic I am particularly unfamiliar with.
I realize that I will not be knowledgeable about every subject that I read about in a student paper but this is not exactly what I am afraid of. I know that I can work with a paper on an unfamiliar issue when it is intended for an uninformed audience and likely if it was written for an introductory course. In these instances I imagine I would be able to follow along with little trouble. The problem is what happens if a student brings me a higher level paper. For example, I am mostly involved in classes that are humanities related, what if a student brings me a paper written for an upper level science course? Perhaps they know the information well but they want help because they have trouble writing clearly about it. It would be much harder for me to help a student write an effective paper when I have no idea what they are talking about and therefore I worry about how to help such a student.
From Steve Sherwood's article "Apprenticed to Failure" I have taken away that I must accept that sometimes I might fail to help a student, however I will always try to learn from such failure when I encounter it. For my particular fear of failing a student who writes a paper on something I know nothing about one solution might be to ask the student to email me with a brief summary of what their paper is about so that I can do a little bit of research before the consultation. That way I would not be so clueless about the subject matter and vocabulary and could potentially be more helpful to the student. Still, I am sure that I will have some particularly tough tutoring sessions at some point and there will be students who I cannot help either because of this particular fear or because of one I have not even thought of yet.
If you permit a writer to be the "content expert" while you serve as "the writing mentor" and the careful reader, you'll rarely go wrong. I have had fairly advanced papers come to me about topics where I had no knowledge. The writer summarized verbally and I asked questions while providing sentence-level help.
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