Working with grad students intimidates me. I feel like I can probably be helpful, but I don't always think they feel that way. I remember once close to the beginning of the time I started working, I had a client come in who refused to work with me because she had originally scheduled to work with a grad student but had been switched to me because of scheduling issues. She was sure that I, as an undergrad, wouldn't be able to really help her (I was sitting right behind her and heard everything she was saying, though she didn't know I was the undergrad tutor). Whoever the receptionist was that day reassured her that all the tutors were competent, but the client was adamant. Now, I had actually sat in on a session with her before and remembered her paper, so I am quite sure that I could actually have been more help than whoever she ended up with, but that wasn't my call to make.
Right in the beginning of Pemberton's article, he says that working with grad students is both no different and very different than working with any other type of student. I can agree with that, but I doubt that most graduate students think of themselves and their writing as being in the same category as the other types of writers and writing we work with. And yes, there is a lot of difference between a freshman in an intro writing course and a grad student with a dissertation, but I agree with Pemberton that most of the strategies we usually use would work fine when dealing with grad student writing. However, I know there are different issues to take into account, such as the fact that grad students' papers are usually longer, more complex, more technical or specialized, and use different kinds of conventions from the ones in undergrad papers. I haven't tutored many grad students thus far, but I hope that with time I will find them less intimidating.
Mike said in class that he'd never worked with a student with a disability--or at least he'd never known about it. I feel the same way. I've certainly never had a client tell me about any special circumstances, and I haven't noticed anything unusual in any of my clients' abilities either. I've had a few clients, ESL speakers and native speakers, who refused to read their papers aloud, but that in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean anything. I think pretty much everyone else who commented on this subject has the right idea: we probably won't know most of the time if a client has some kind of disability, and the important thing is that we really listen to each client and run the session according to the cues they give us (unless those cues are that they're really only interested in us copyediting). I think that I handled my first few clients with a "one approach fits all" kind of mentality; that is, my mindset was something like, "If I develop a method like the ones we've read about in class, I can repeat that, for the most part, for every client." Obviously wrong. I never consciously thought that either, but I can see now that I wasn't looking at me clients individually enough to really cater to their differences.
Mike said in class that he'd never worked with a student with a disability--or at least he'd never known about it. I feel the same way. I've certainly never had a client tell me about any special circumstances, and I haven't noticed anything unusual in any of my clients' abilities either. I've had a few clients, ESL speakers and native speakers, who refused to read their papers aloud, but that in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean anything. I think pretty much everyone else who commented on this subject has the right idea: we probably won't know most of the time if a client has some kind of disability, and the important thing is that we really listen to each client and run the session according to the cues they give us (unless those cues are that they're really only interested in us copyediting). I think that I handled my first few clients with a "one approach fits all" kind of mentality; that is, my mindset was something like, "If I develop a method like the ones we've read about in class, I can repeat that, for the most part, for every client." Obviously wrong. I never consciously thought that either, but I can see now that I wasn't looking at me clients individually enough to really cater to their differences.
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