Working It Out

I had conferences with my students today to help them work on their latest paper. When I left them last Thursday, it seemed as though they had the task well in hand. I had been very clear and provided a number of samples to be sure they understood the prompt and knew how to approach it. It seemed that the students were confident and had a good grasp of the texts.
I had asked them to write a rhetorical analysis of Douglass' Narrative and his "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech. I also asked them to use a secondary source that we analyzed and discussed in class.
While the secondary source gave them a lot of trouble, by the time Thursday's class was over, I thought they grasped the argument it was making. But I didn't hear from anyone over the weekend, although I asked them to send me their thesis and plans early. That is always a bad sign. And when I got to class this morning, about 3/4 of them didn't seem to understand that this was a comparison/contrast essay or know how to tackle it at all. This is problematic because the draft is due on Thursday for peer review.
I hope that today's class, in which I had a chance to speak with each student individually, helped, but there is at least one student who is really getting upset at the very different response I have had to her writing than that she has been accustomed to. She is an intelligent student, and on her diagnostic, she did as well as anyone could have done, but since then, her papers have been vague, murky, and have shown that she does not have a grasp on using quotations or structuring an essay.
Apparently her grades have been very high in past writing classes, so now she is sure that it is I who am the problem. It is difficult to deal with students who have become exasperated, even in such a small class as this one is.
Teaching is such a delicate thing sometimes. I suppose anything involving human beings is.