Reading the Writing Center Part Deux

It is interesting to me that there has been scholarship devoted to a passive-agressive attack towards tutoring. Discussed in the article was the fact that many tutors tend to approach a difficult situation with a rather agressive attitude: a tutor encountered a difficult student who would merely concede to all of the tutor's suggestions, and, thus, the tutor began to give elaborate, and often negative, suggestions to counter-attack the student's passive attitude towards his writing approach. This, as was argued, can become a method by which tutors, having to deal with the frustration and often dissatisfaction that comes with tutoring, begin to approach their own tutoring. While erroneous, the article asserts that this is a "natural" method of approach-natural in the sense that it is a common approach to such problems. However, the author continues to claim that we, as tutors, must recognize the fallacy in this approach, and curb our instances of agression, for it is not the student that we are lashing at, but the frustration that is inherent in the writing process. This agression often runs counter-productive to our goals, leading the student to essentially blockade the tutor and his "attacks" with the typical self-defensive state of mind.
Still to me, though, the most fascinating thing I have discovered through the readings is the amount of writing center scholarship devoted to the various methods imbedded within tutoring. When you picture a writing center, you do not take into account the variables that are intrinsic in the tutoring process. Feminist perspectives, multicultrualist perspectives, emotional perspectives, developmental perspectives, psychological perspectives, all these elements bleed directly into the tutoring process, and often at the same time. One can both have a female student from Romania with a self-imposed psychological roadblock to the process of writing. In this one session, a tutor must address, simultaneously, the issue of English as a second language, the psychological issues imbedded within the student, and, if necessary, the issue of being a woman in an inherently patriarchal society. It would seem that being a writing center tutor would be simple: help student's with their papers, and possibly, in an ideal world, devleop themselves as writers. This is simply not the case. The tutor must be both a writer, a teacher, a psychologist, a sociologist, and a companion all in one. Simple is the last thing that follows becoming a writing center tutor.