Throughout the semester, I've been required to read a new text of the ways of tutoring. Each text was different: Some focused on the client, some the text, some the collaboration, and others the interpersonal communication. Each week I felt like I was being pushed one way then pushed another, never staying in the same spot. Of course, each week I would attempt to apply what I had learned, often failing miserably. I don't believe whether I failed or did well really mattered, though. I believe it was the recognition and attempt of applying a new way to work in the Writers' Room. It was the mixture and change I made to each way of tutoring that helped me develop a way that worked for my clients and for me. The feeling of being pushed and pulled was, at times, frustrating, but is the way I feel in the Writers' Room.

As Matthew Ortoleva points out in "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center," consultants are often pushed and pulled from a text- or writer-centered session. I'm certain all of the consultants feel like they're pushed and pulled, even within a session. Sessions should be individualized. This should also pertain to sessions that are only text- or writer-centered. If a session is text-centered, the consultant (as he should see from consultation notes of previous sessions) may see that the client struggles with tenses and choose to individualize that session to solely that. If a session focuses on the writer, it may be individualized to developing and brainstorming an essay and its parts and organization.

I have come to realize that the feeling of being pushed and pulled reading the articles and texts was foreshadowing the feeling of being pushed and pulled in the Writers' Room. Yet with the article by Ortoleva, I am certain that this feeling is no feeling at all; it is the way the Center works. There is no center. There are middles, middles that, like a sailboat in a river, sway back and forth, wherever the wind takes it. It is a middle we must get accustomed to, though it is always changing, like wind and water. The consultant is the wind; the client, the river; the text, the boat. The wind must work with the river to make the sailboat float, to make it flow towards its destination. It is a collaboration between the river and the wind - the consultant and the client - that keep the boat afloat, that make the session successful.

Ortoleva, Matthew. "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis?q=book/print/209