In the Business

This was it!  Today was my first day being my own tutor.  I was so excited I looked up my WCOnline schedule from home almost immediately after waking up this morning and was shocked at what I saw.

Not only was the dark, midnight blue bar blocking me off for training missing, but there were no tiny white boxes either – at all.  Instead there were bars of varying length in a lighter blue and people’s names popped up when my cursor ran over them.  I was booked up.  I had the blog meeting for the first hour of my shift, two-hour long appointments, a half-hour long appointment, another hour-long and ending with a half-hour long appointment. 

 That (somewhat boring) list of my appointments meant to point out to you that I was taking in all the details and going through what the students wanted to discuss and what classes and majors they were in, because I was nervous.  When I get nervous I like to know everything I can about something before I venture into it.  Most of my writers had filled out what they wanted to discuss and given good information so I was excited, I was still nervous, but I was prepared.

Only thing was, as the end of the blog meeting rolled around and my first appointment was supposed to start nothing happened.  Other tutors were called to the front for their prospective appointments and I was left in “the cubby” without an appointment.   I waited far longer than the allotted 10/15 minutes before I declared my appointment missed just in case someone showed up looking for quick, last-minute help on their paper.  They apparently did not.

The appointments that I did get to do today were amazing!  The first was a girl of similar interests to myself and we really had an open conversation about the questions she wanted to address in her paper.  We talked together and for the first time I really felt like I was a tutor.  I was riding the bike not only without the training wheels, but all by myself without anyone watching and I did not fall off.  It was a successful session and we had a really conversation.  It was great to see everything discussed and read in my theory class put to use and truly understand what it was discussing.

So now, after having half my appointments miss out and the other half go well into tutorial discussions about the writing at hand, I feel like an UCWbLer now and I think I’m going to enjoy it.