Online Tutoring

After reading The Anxieties of Distance: Online Tutors Reflect by David A. Carlson and Eileen Apperson-Williams, I thought that online tutoring didn't sound like a bad idea, but I definitely don't think it's something that I would be interested in doing. I agree with some of the tutors in the piece that it's a lot less personal, and it'd be easy to misinterpret and misunderstand what someone is trying to say. I really like the face-to-face interaction I have when tutoring someone, because their facial expressions convey what they feel about a certain issue and if they're confused about something. The rules that are involved with online tutoring seem like they'd be really difficult to follow because I want the freedom of saying what I want to say (not bashing their work or personally attacking them) but having an actual personal conversation with them so I can get to know more about them. I just think that by speaking with a person face-to-face, it builds a relationship with that person and both people can interact and explore ideas better than just talking through e-mail and assuming the tutor is getting the correct content of the piece. It says that through online tutoring students should be put at ease and feel comfortable, but it doesn't exactly say how to do that and I'm not sure if that's even possible. Yes, students aren't embarressed by the fact they need help because no one is going to see them sitting in the writing center and the tutor isn't going to know what they look like, but the boundary that's put between two people on computers is too extreme. It doesn't give either one the opportunity to explore ideas, get information about the client's background, etc. It seems to me as though it's more of a grammar "fix it shop" and a place someone can send their paper when they are tired of trying to write because they want someone else to do their paper for them. That's just my opinion though. I've had the opportunity to talk to teachers about a paper I've done for one of their classes over the internet and face-to-face. The face-to-face interaction allowed me to know what it was I was doing wrong, what I needed to include, what was unclear, etc. You don't get that from just sending your paper via e-mail and getting a short message back that says what you did wrong, and you usually don't know how to correct your mistakes because you still don't understand it exactly and you feel as though you've already bothered them enough and don't want to waste someone's time. I just feel online tutoring is too impersonal for me, but it may work with other tutors. I enjoy meeting students and working collaboratively on their paper to help relieve some of the stress they have from writing, and work on making them better writers.