A Bit of Background

I've been tutoring since I started college – before that if you count helping classmates with homework. My freshman year of college, I tutored Algebra I for a small group of high school students. I enjoyed it, and it felt like I was helping them understand the material (it can be hard to tell sometimes).

Unfortunately, due to schedule conflicts I had to stop doing that when my sophomore year started. At the beginning of this semester, I got the opportunity to begin tutoring again through the Tau Beta Pi honor society, which I was initiated into last fall. I've enjoyed it greatly: for many students it is easy to tell if I've been helpful (if they show up more than once), which has helped me become a more effective tutor. Not to mention that hanging out with the other tutors is a great time in and of itself.

Since I mostly tutor CS (a popular major here, at least for freshman and first-semester sophomore students), I spend a lot of my time trying to explain the concepts behind C++ syntax (example: x->doSomething() vs x.doSomething() vs X::doSomething()). There is one project in particular that I've spent a lot of time helping people with: building a CLI schedule application.

The requirements for the application are pretty simple: read data from a CSV-ish file, print it out in various ways (day schedule and week schedule, mostly), take input for new events, and write it all back to a file. By this point – 2 semesters into the curriculum – students have been exposed to all of these things at least once. It's just a problem of putting it all together (and of understanding pointers). The professor for the course has even provided a helper class that reads individual lines into vectors of strings, which is the hard part of reading the file. While most students just need help filling in gaps in their understanding, occasionally they lack basic understanding about the language itself (which is a very bad sign this late in the semester) or seem unwilling or incapable of programming on their own. Occasionally, they're also assholes about it. E is one such student.

Meet E

E came for help for the first time on Tuesday. He wasn't the first there and I was busy helping another person at that time. Despite that, he proceeded to repeatedly ask me to come and help him. By the time I finally got to him, I knew I'd be in for a long haul.

This rather large programming assignment is due today. On Tuesday, he'd barely touched it. To make it worse, he exhibited little understanding of what he was doing. I helped him finish implementing one of the required classes (there are 4 very similar classes) and told him to work on the others himself while I helped other students. He gave me an odd look, packed up his laptop and left.

I should mention (it will be important later) that E is neither American nor a native English speaker. However, he has a firm enough grasp of the language to understand what I'm saying and to respond, so I am rather confident that he is able to understand enough of what he might read on the internet to finish much of the project himself.

E: Redux

I am in the habit of giving my email to students when they ask, because I can often quickly identify the source of their problem and direct them towards the solution. Having given my email address to E, it was not surprising that I got an email from him yesterday morning. The question it contained, however, was simply "when will you be tutoring today?". I responded, expecting to find him in RGAN commons (where we tutor) when I arrived. Instead, he showed up about 30 minutes later and again badgered me to come and help him while I was busy with another person who was working on a different assignment. Other students were hanging out, though they didn't need help at the moment.

E walked up to badger me again right as a member of the group I was with told a joke – everybody laughed. Everybody except E, of course, who hadn't heard the joke. He threw me an incredulous look and stated "You guys are making fun of me" quietly. Before I could respond, he stalked back to his table. I shrugged it off, somewhat thankful because he had finally stopped badgering me.

Coming up to me again about 15 minutes later, he announced that he really needed help before he had to leave in 30 minutes. Annoyed, I told my current tutoree that I'd be back once I'd helped him. He had plenty to work anyway.

I was appalled to find that E had barely touched his code since Tuesday. One more class was implemented – mostly with copypasta from what I'd helped him with – and a legion of compiler errors (which Visual Studio had dutifully highlighted in red) were preventing him from progressing. The worst part, however, was what he said when I sat down to help him: "Fix it."

Fix it? Really?

I did a double-take when I heard that. Fix it? I'm a tutor! I'm supposed to help him understand what to do, not be an interactive debugger! Things went downhill from there. I explained to him for the third time that you need the variable types before their names in function declarations – apparently neither time I'd explained that on Tuesday had stuck and he hadn't bothered Googling the error messages. About half of the errors were in that vein.

In the process of going through God-knows-what, he made this comment to me: 'Whether I pass or not depends on the quality of the TAs and tutors, you know?'. (Note: I don't remember his exact wording, but the gist of it is the same.) I very nearly told him that he was on his own right then. The final straw came about five minutes later, when he pulled out his phone and started texting in the middle of my explanation of what the address-of (&) operator does to pointers.

Naturally, when he started texting I stopped talking and finished my memory diagram. "Continue," he told me as he motioned me towards the computer. Not the paper, the computer. And then he was texting away again. I stood and told him that I'd be back in a moment, then grabbed one of the other tutors and dragged him out to the hall. After I explained the situation to him, he advised me to give E something to work on and explain to him that I needed to help other students. So I did. Again, E immediately got up and left.

This is not how to get someone to help you

Today I got this gem of an email:

When I got this email, I was completely floored. I'd dedicated about 1.5 hours to helping this guy over the course of a couple of days. My normal working time for those 2 days is 3 hours, so I spent roughly *half of my time working with E!* And yet he has the gall to call me a racist for supposedly helping others more?

He caught me as I about to head to a CS gathering and asked if I could help him. My negative response resulted in a demand to know why I had helped other people on this project more. Indeed, several other people had come for help with this project, and all of them had most of it done or were stuck on some conceptual part (such as opening a file) and were able to complete the rest on their own. The only person I spent more time with is someone who paid me to come in on the weekend and privately tutor him. Ultimately, I told him two things: (1) I didn't help others more, and (2) I couldn't help him. Neither claim was accepted.

In closing…

This situation is still developing. The project was due earlier today, and he said he was going to ask his professor for an extension. I doubt that he'll get it. Even still, I am concerned about his potential reaction to this and how it'll impact things for me – in particular tutoring. One thing I'm pretty confident about, though: I'm not going to give out my email to students as easily anymore.