Sucess Stories

Texas Tech Tutor Perspective

by Rebecca Neitzel
ESL Initiative, Texas Tech University

I have always wanted to do something worthwhile in my life; something that mattered. This idea has floated around in my consciousness for years and until just this semester was, I thought, doomed to stay there. Yet, this semester I was blindsided by this opportunity which, I will admit, at first, I was unhappy about. On the first day of class I was hit with the realization that I was going to be doing a lot of work. I was going to have to tutor.

I have never tutored anyone on anything in my life. I have never had another person rely on me for help in anything. I had just changed my minor from education because of the fact I was terrified to have to teach something and that I would teach it wrong and ruin someone’s life somehow. Tutoring, therefore, was unnerving. And tutoring adults! This was downright frightening. I wanted to drop the class, but I had nowhere to go and I needed the credits.

No amount of preparation could have prepared me for what I encountered in my first few days of tutoring. There were ups and downs. There were times when I thought that I would rather die than miss a session and there were times when I would rather die than go. The one thing that kept me going was my student.

I had a very unique experience in that I was able to be a one-on-one tutor to only one student for the whole semester. My student was all mine and I was all his. I could not afford to miss because he completely relied on me, and I was useless to the rest of the students at our site if he missed. We had our own style and they had theirs.

My student was also unique in what he wanted from our sessions. He had left school in the 3rd grade in Mexico and never learned how to write. He can read Spanish and speak both it and English very well. He could not, however, write even his name without struggling. He could not form the letters without complete concentration let alone spell them correctly. He said that the only thing he wanted from me was to help him write. He didn’t care what he wrote; he just wanted to do it.

This was an extremely difficult situation for me. I was so afraid that I would make it too hard or too simple for him. I wanted to help him the best way I could and I was having to just make it all up as we went along. Sometimes he would get frustrated at his mistakes and those were the days I had to give him the most praise and slow down or even stop the lesson completely so that we could just talk and get him to a relaxed state so that we could keep going. I knew that if he got too down on himself, I could loose him. What we did and what we achieved could not have been done without working on some very difficult aspects of the English language and I am still amazed at how a man who, at the age of seven, stopped going to school so he could go work in the fields of West Texas and help his family survive, could go from struggling to write his own name to writing full sentences with ease.

I had always thought that it would be later on in my life when I would be able to make a difference; sometime long after college. This class, however, gave me the opportunity to do something today. I was forced to jump right in and do something that scared me and made me uncomfortable and in the end, I have been filled with the most amazing feelings of accomplishment and pride. When I was putting my workbook together for this project, I would look back and see what my student had done with whichever activity it was that I was creating and would sometimes just stare at the progress he had made. I still cannot believe sometimes that I was a part of that. This thing that I was reluctant about just a few months ago has now become something very important to me. My student is important to me. He has helped me just as much if not more that I have helped him. He has helped me realize that being a contributing part of my community does not have to be put off until after college. Helping does not have to wait. It can be done in just two days a week for a little over an hour at a time.

Now, I don’t know if my workbook will be helpful to other students or tutors in the future, but it will be a lasting reminder that, at one time, one student and one tutor came together to become better at something, and we did just that.

About the Author

Rebecca Neitzel is a Texas Tech University Junior majoring in linguistics. She is one of the students in the Texas Tech ESL Initiative, a joint project in which Texas Tech students get course credit for tutoring students through Literacy Lubbock.