Editor’s note: We would like to thank Robert Koch, Assistant Dean of Student Success and Director of the Writing, Tutoring & Math, Merrimack College, North Andover (Massachusetts), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Robert Koch. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

               Robert Koch

My professional response to the pandemic began with the Writing Center Listserv, where I first read about select institutions moving online for the balance of the spring term. Our Spring Break was less than a week away, so I brought the issue up with my Dean. He suggested that students might want to take books and computers home, so I passed the word along. I took a selection of my own resources with me that Friday as well, and by the time the weekend was over, I knew that my team and I would be moving all campus tutorial services within our unit into online environments during an impromptu second week of break, and that we would assist department-based tutoring as they did the same.

After the move, we tracked usage across all areas until finals, and what we discovered was a staggering drop in Writing Center and Math Center use: both lost about 80% of their business in the first weeks after the extended break. The Writing Center recovered–mostly–by finals. However, the Math Center began to look like our department-based tutoring: long stretches of emptiness punctuated by frenzied students engaged in last minute cramming. Both situations speak to the differences in student perception between writing and math, something I will explore at another time.

WCOnline is our management software; we do synchronous online consultations. The pandemic required us to move online fully, incorporating the audio and video features that we had not made a priority in the past, but which we will continue to use from now on, even after the pandemic. The cues are invaluable. In addition, we use Zoom for our staff meetings.

Our sixteen writing consultants responded to the change about as we expected: a mixed bag. Some thrived, happy to be working from home. Others, especially seniors, were upset at the disconnect from all they knew, though tutoring itself was not the issue. Our trainees, who do volunteer hours in the spring, had significantly less floor time than we wanted, but as of this writing, none of them have abandoned work as a writing consultant because of it. I was unhappy with the overall disconnect as well, with the lack of community that came from us not being together in a shared space, and with the amount of badgering it further required to make sure Client Report Forms and Timesheets were completed on time. But most importantly, I missed the opportunities for mentorship and relationship building. Sitting in the corner and listening to a consultation from afar is much less intrusive than dropping into an online session, I have come to believe.

Now, as we prepare for a Fall return, I am concerned about many issues. Massachusetts’ four stage reopening plan seems to be a good one, but my family history has a thread in the 1918 Pandemic, and I am certain that, nationally, we are repeating hundred-year-old mistakes. Still, “allons y,” the tenth Doctor said. In our center, we are setting up individual stations with six foot distances between them, six foot pathways, whiteboard barriers, and, on each table, plexiglass screens, hand sanitizer, and cleaning products. No paper, pens, pencils, books, phones, tablets, computers, or keyboards will pass between consultant and client. All materials  must be online, even while working face-to-face. They will sit opposite each other.

I am, strangely, most upset about seating. However, as a unit, the Assistant Directors, our Admin, and I are committed to our students’ safety, seating be damned. The result of these guidelines is that two rooms that held 80 people between them for training, and at times held 40 in consultations, will now have eight, maybe ten workspaces between them. Eight of forty. We’re down another 80%. Fortunately, we will keep online services in place, and will likely make it a 50-50 split with face-to-face offerings, so in all likelihood, we’re not down that badly.

Much remains to be done in our response to this pandemic. Online tutoring will play a larger role than before. Training and professional development will remain online, though I hope not permanently. Our digital resources will effectively replace the books on the shelves, something that has been coming for a while now. Yet in all of this, I still find hope, because the one thing we can be sure of is change, and that we can adapt so quickly to this fluid situation, however difficult it is to do–this is our most valuable lesson.