Most days when I’m working at the Writing Center, I find I want to shoot myself. Some days I really enjoy it, but I’ve learned over time that is rare. We only had three consultants return this fall, so I’m obviously not the only one who dislikes it here.
This is the issue- I’m not trained to work with international students. I’m well aware that I’m going to sound like an asshole in this, and that’s not my intention- but I have a really hard time working with most international students because I rarely understand what they are saying, and have an ethical issue in correcting their entire paper. When a student comes to me with a paper full of improper tenses, never-ending sentences without subjects and plagiarized paragraphs (which are all the more obvious when the font suddenly changes) if I fix all of that for them, they are no longer the writer of that paper. They shouldn’t get credit for the work that I’m doing. So usually I try to focus on the main problems I see, but even that can be a lost cause. Half the time, the student has no idea what I’m talking about when I mention verb tense or subject-verb agreement. I’m not an English tutor- I’m a writing center consultant. They don’t pay me enough to write papers for people.
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