Editor’s note: We would like to thank Jenna Chiavacci Bohn, Instructor at Carroll Community College and McDaniel College, Baltimore (Maryland), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Jenna Chiavacci Bohn. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

Jenna Chiavacci Bohn

I’ll never forget my first day of tutoring on Microsoft Teams. It was a couple of weeks after the word spread that, following an extended spring break, we would not be returning to campus for the foreseeable future. Once the announcement was made, our Academic Center spent spring break frantically adapting our services to the new, exclusively remote world of higher education.

On day one of post-spring break classes, my first tutoring session was, thankfully, with a familiar face. I had worked with this particular student—a nontraditional ESL student—on a weekly basis during the first half of the semester. This familiarity afforded me a bit of undue confidence as our scheduled start time neared. It did not take long, however, for me to realize that tutoring in the time of COVID-19 would be unlike anything I’d experienced before in my eight years as a tutor.

There was something about simply logging into my computer for the session instead of spreading out my notebooks, style guides, and scrap paper at a quiet table in the center that set me on edge from the start. As I carefully stacked books beneath my laptop to find the perfect angle for the camera, I suddenly realized that behind me, my messy living room was clearly visible on the screen. With just a few minutes to spare before the meeting, I rushed to tidy the space immediately behind my desk. Once satisfied that I would not be judged too harshly by my tiny, messy apartment, I plopped back onto my desk chair and opened Teams.

Once the student entered the meeting, we greeted each other excitedly after over three weeks without a session. Immediately, however, my dogs charged into the room, barking and searching for the source of the stranger’s voice. Embarrassed, I immediately muted my microphone and hid my video while trying to calm them down. As it turns out, barking dogs should have been the least of my worries. From that point on, the session was, academically speaking, a total flop. My internet connection was shoddy, and the student was unsure how to share their document through Teams. The whiteboard function would not load, and the chat proved useless when it came to modeling the format for MLA citations. In all, we spent more time discussing our technical difficulties than the student’s writing.

[pullquote]As it usually goes, though, the academic aspect of our session proved to be less important than the human aspect.[/pullquote] In between conversations about subject-verb agreement and run-on sentences, we laughed through our struggles with the technology. We caught up on what had changed in our personal lives since our last session a few weeks before. We shared our worries about teaching, tutoring, and learning in the emergency remote format. And we expressed our anxieties about the rapidly changing world around us. While we might not have achieved all of the student’s academic goals by the meeting’s end, it was obvious that, for the both of us, the session served as a nice respite from the craziness surrounding us.

As I have suspected all along and solidified during the spring 2020 semester, the role of a writing tutor reaches far beyond one’s ability to assist with citation or explain a grammar rule. While the academic aspects of the job are certainly important, it is often our humanity and support that students crave more than anything. Tutoring in the time of COVID-19 served to magnify that fact.