Tutors and other people

A word about tutors:

I had two very different tutors this semester. Both were guys and both were post-grads, but that's where the similarity ends. Let's call the English tutor John and the Reli tutor Joe . We met with John weekly and with Joe every second week.

John is probably in his mid-20s. He has floppy dark hair, brown eyes and dresses in that shorts, jandals and a big shirt style so typical of your average Kiwi bloke. John is doing his Masters on Milton. He really likes Milton, he's interested in him and takes every chance to mention him in relation to whatever we are talking about in English. Now, John was very new to tutoring. The first session was a disaster: he handed out some poems, made us go round the room reading them - no one knew where they were supposed to start or stop, or even how to pronounce the weird Old English words. At the end of each poem, he's say: so what do you guys think? and after a few moments, someone might say something and he'd just nod, and the silence would continue. We'd then go on to reading the next poem and the same thing would happen. If someone asked what something meant, he'd hunt about on the page to find the reference and then say he had no idea, maybe it meant such-and-such. He also kept checking the time on his cell phone, as anxious as any of us for the torture to be over. We all left ten minutes early.

Now, one of my new mature student friends was in the tut with me and she immediately arranged to be moved to another group. I asked as well, but due to numbers they couldn't swop me out. So I talked to the senior tutor and gave her feedback on why I wanted to be moved. She supervises the tutors and she must have done a really good job because from then on, John just got better and better. He relaxed, he brought biscuits, he came up with really interesting exercises, he wrote down everything we contributed on the white board, he was active, he divided us into groups and got us to debate  issues - in other words, he engaged with us and more importantly, he engaged our attention during the tutorial too. By the end, we were a cohesive group and we'd learnt a lot and we were all sorry to say goodbye. He was a bit slow with marking our assignments but kept us informed and apologized for the delays, one of which was due to personal bereavement.

Now, Religious studies and Joe. Joe is doing a PhD in - I don't know what. He's been in the PhD program since 2007. Joe always wear a cap, a big fisherman's jersey, jandals, has fuzzy facial hair and a perpetual half-grin on his face. If I'd seen him on the street, my first thought would not have been 'academic' - I'd have been looking for the collecting tin on the ground. Joe, however, is very academic indeed. He runs his tutorials from his chair at the head of the room and his method is to simply rehash on of the set readings and ask a number of questions. Most of the students just sit and stare, a few contribute a thought now and then. When they ask questions, it is usually about which reading they should pick to write about for the next essay. After this discussion, Joe then gives us one or two of the preceeding week's student essays to read and comment on. Generally they are essays which have scored 9 or 9.5 out of 10. It's quite hard commenting on the work of your peers, even if it is anonymous. When it comes to returning essays, Joe is also very, very slow and his comments generally come off a pre-typed list (I know this because sometimes they'll show up as ... 4. In future essays, you should .. etc - but there is no 1 or 2 or 3 preceding it. One girl I know got a comment that started 11. Try to ... etc. He knows everything about citations and how to put together an academic argument, but on the whole he seems to be going through the motions with us, rather than exhibiting any genuine enthusiasm for his subject.

John may have been young and relatively inexperienced but in the end - for me - I think he was the better tutor.