I only had 45 minutes. When time was almost over, I was freaking out. Every little detail seemed to be important, I thought I had to comment on each flaw I spotted.
Fifteen months have passed since I landed in Canada with my wife and child. It was not easy to get adapted and start again from scratch in a new country and environment. Well, to be honest, not completely. There was a professional life behind that, in one way or another, helped me navigate on these uncharted waters for me. I was a professor at Salesian University in Ecuador, and I had to deal with academic and administrative tasks on a daily basis. Unlike in Canada, where tasks are usually more evenly distributed, I had to do a little of everything; preparing material for classes, teaching, marking, tutoring, providing updated syllabuses for colleagues, guiding returning students, requesting data from peers, writing reports for the career principal, and more. All of this was part of my daily routine.
This background, in addition to my current position as international student in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, led me to get a job related to the academic field. Actually, two jobs. First, writing tutor for the Academic Learning Center, and second, teaching assistant (TA) in the Faculty of Arts. Although both have been quite interesting and useful for my professional life, keeping up to date with these responsibilities, in addition to my own course work, has been really overwhelming. In fact, the Fall 2023 term was long and heavy for me, but I made it to survive and tell something about it.
What I’d like to share is some of the experiences I went through as an academic tutor at the Academic Learning Center, University of Manitoba. Despite the three modalities offered, in-person meetings, live-online sessions and email feedback, this last one was by far the most common for me. Every shift lasts 45 minutes. It should be enough to read four to five pages and detect flaws the writer is advised to correct. Everything seemed to be ok at the beginning. Nevertheless, after the first three or four shifts I had to complete, I realize I was kind of lost.
There were really good papers that did not need many comments, others had some issues with citations, grammar, writing flow, paragraph coherence and more. Time was barely enough for these ones. Finally, there were documents, or more accurately, simply files that had been uploaded with no structure at all. They were a messy bunch of letters, misplaced punctuation signs and blanks. It would have taken me a whole week to decode what was written and provide some decent feedback.
However, I only had 45 minutes. When time was almost over, I was freaking out. Every little detail seemed to be important, I thought I had to comment on each flaw I spotted. Then, suddenly, I remembered those wise words from one of the tutors who trained us, “go for the big picture stuff”. At that moment, I said to myself, “relax, you are going to make it!” As a result, I had to let go my obsessive desire of trying to fix it all in order to concentrate my comments on deep observations that could be useful for that particular student, who needed guide, more than criticism and countless flaws corrections.
At the end, I learned to focus my mind on the main issues every paper had and my work as a writing tutor began to flow more smoothly, but I still don’t understand how someone can be able to do all of that in just 45 minutes!
Nicolas Dousdebes Cordova