You Do the Math

It started in seventh grade: the breakdown of any mathematical understanding I had acquired over the previous twelve years of my life. I took my graded math paper up to the teacher's desk and asked for help with one of many problems she had marked.

"I didn't understand how to do this problem," I told her.

"An excuse is a dressed up lie!" she replied. I retreated in confusion, but this time the problem was my limited understanding of language rather than math. However, there ended any help I might have asked for or been given. Unfortunately, there did not end the requirement that I take math classes.

I spent the next six years watching math instructors work problems on chalk boards. Sometimes, if I were really desperate, I would watch a friend work a math problem on a piece of paper. I always watched. "Here," someone would say, "this is how you do it." Numbers would move in patterns over the page, interspersed with symbols. "There. That's the answer. That's how you do it," my tutor would proclaim.

I am a tutor now. I listen to the students as they explain to me where they are in their writing, where they want to go, how they might get there. I offer suggestions. I point to words that might be confusing, sentence structures that might mislead. I tell them how their writing creates meaning or obscures it. I repeat what I've read in their papers, tell them what I expect next as a reader. Sometimes, I write on their papers. Sometimes, I draw a line from an antecedent to a pronoun.

I've never opened my lap top and said, "Here, this is how you do it." I've never constructed a thesis for my next paper while they look on. It might help me, but it would be pointless for the student.

When I started in the writing center, I had to force myself to put down my pencil. It all looked so easy to me. I wanted to say, "Here, let me fix your paper." I'm glad I never did. The next time I am tempted to re-write even a sentence for a student, I think I will remember the hundreds of math problems I saw worked out on paper and how very little I learned.