ESL Contradictions

This past week I tutored a client who was part of an ESL class. Now if you were at the most recent staff meeting you know we had two speakers from the ESL Lab come in and tell us about what they do. They gave us the advice that if we ever get a student from and ESL class don't tutor them. Tell them to come to the ESL Lab because that is where they are supposed to be and that they aren't actually supposed to be coming to us because they aren't ready yet.
But here's where things got weird.
The student was required to come in by his ESL teacher. I was completely taken by surprise. The teacher had required all her students to come in and get help from the writing center and she even sent them with a form for the tutor to fill out. We were asked to give our name, email, how long the appointment ran, and what we talked about with the student. I'm sure there was no reason for me to be annoyed with the form but I was. Why did this teacher need my email? I already filled out the rest of the paper with my name and signature, it just struck me as weird and somehow inappropriate.
The next problem was that the paper the student came in with was 7 pages long. There is no way I could get through 7 pages in one session. I asked him what he most wanted to work on and we focused on two parts of the paper. Those two parts were a page and a half each and going over them took up the entire hour long session.
Then there was the language barrier. I can understand every ESL student I have ever tutored but this student I could not. It was very awkward, I couldn't understand him and he couldn't understand what I was saying. He would repeat the words he knew the meaning of and then just nod along with anything else I said. I tried to give really simple examples of why I thought something didn't make sense or why he should change a part of his paper. It was incredibly hard to feel like I had accomplished anything when he could understand why this didn't fit with that sentence. I was forced to focus on making sure he stayed in the same tense and keeping things either plural or singular because that was all he could understand from the session.
After the session concluded I came away feeling very frustrated. The session had felt like almost a complete bust and I couldn't figure out why the teacher sent the students to the writing center since it appeared my student was not ready for our kind of help. Then I realized that the due date for the assignment was not until November 11th so I could possibly have more session of the same caliber and that depressed me. I came to work at the writing center so I could help students and in that session I felt I had not completed my goal.