"Minimalist Tutoring" and the Emphasis on the Student

I found that North and Brooks shared a very similar view on what is the most important aspect of being a peer tutor; the writer. Brooks says, “Our primary object in the writing center session is not the paper, but the student (4). This is very similar to North’s quote/ our class’s mantra for the day; “Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (438). Both give their views on what a peer tutor is expected to do, such as listening and ask question in order to probe the students to discover for themselves how to revise their own paper. However, focusing back on Brooks, his ideas of minimalist tutoring certainly puts the tutor in a passive role, forcing the students to be actively engaged in their writing. Relating to one of our main points in class today, Brooks made it seem almost detrimental to the peer tutoring processes to help students with mechanical errors. It is not our job to just be an editor in the sense that we mark up a paper and leave it with no explanation. However, I do believe there is a constructive way to point of grammatical errors that get in the way of the papers while still giving content priority. Once the major issue of getting the students to critically think about their paper and understand how certain adjustments can be beneficial, there wouldn’t be any harm in mentioning a few grammatical errors.