You're right, Melissa. I had to hold onto my hat when reading this week's articles. I'm afraid I did a bit of ranting to the other people that were in my church's library halfway through my reading of "A Critique of Pure Tutoring"...something to the effect of how I hated that the article made so much sense because it was contradicting everything I believe in.
After my rant, my friend Sam said simply, "Well, I guess you'd just have to be flexible and go with whatever each student needs." That ended my rant abruptly. Truth. I finished reading and of course that's the conclusion that the article come to as well. That'll teach me to hold my ranting until the end.
Back on the side of minimalist tutoring, I tried some of Brooks' ideas in my consultations this week. Namely, I tried sitting on the other side of the writer so that my right hand was far away from their paper. It occurs to me that when I put my right hand closest to their paper, their right hand has to be far away from it, and assuming they're right-handed, that is bad. I don't tend to write in a lot of stuff on writers' papers, unless it's me being a scribe for their ideas in the margins, but I like that move of making it easier for them to get at their paper than it is for me. It's worked out really well so far, making me, just by virtue of my physical placement, much more focused on the writer's ownership of their paper.
In the realm of email consultations I'm plugging away. I rather like it, but it's still hard for me. It's odd just writing a letter to someone and throwing it out into the abyss, knowing that you'll never know how they responded to it. Not knowing anything about a writer apart from their name and a few pages of writing is disconcerting. I've also been focusing on trying to spend the first bit of an appointment on small talk to try and learn more about the writer, and email consultations are an odd contrast to that.
That's the news for this week. Last official post, but I may continue writing because it's a good way to organize the week's events. :)
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Email Consultations!
Are stressful! But fun. It's a good challenge, I think.
It's all the things we talked about in class--harder to communicate just with written words without the ability to ask questions and use body language. At the same time, though, isn't helping people communicate with only written words what we do at the Writing Center? This is just another form of writing to learn, which makes it kind of exciting!
My first for realz email consultation was today, and it was rather stressful. It was a concurrent enrollment English 101 student writing a personal essay about a learning experience--standard 101 prompt. Her learning experience, though, was the process of writing the essay itself. It was kind of mind-boggling, and as soon as I comprehended that I was like, "THAT IS SO META." It was interesting, and she did a good job with it! I had trouble writing my letter back, though, because it was hard to pinpoint exactly what needed changed. She needed to make her meta-ness more clear to the audience, but it was hard for me to pinpoint ways she could do a better job with that. She was also writing in this stream-of-consciousness style that she actually pulled off really well for the most part, but I'm not sure she was intentionally using stream of consciousness or if that's just what ended up happening. So I talked to her about stream of consciousness, warned her that it's not common in English 101 writing, and that it takes a lot of mental power on the part of the audience to understand it. That said, I picked out a couple places where her stream of consciousness made some logical jumps that I couldn't follow.
It was an odd paper. My cynical side said, "of course you would get something so complicated for your first for realz email consultation!" Ah well.
It's all the things we talked about in class--harder to communicate just with written words without the ability to ask questions and use body language. At the same time, though, isn't helping people communicate with only written words what we do at the Writing Center? This is just another form of writing to learn, which makes it kind of exciting!
My first for realz email consultation was today, and it was rather stressful. It was a concurrent enrollment English 101 student writing a personal essay about a learning experience--standard 101 prompt. Her learning experience, though, was the process of writing the essay itself. It was kind of mind-boggling, and as soon as I comprehended that I was like, "THAT IS SO META." It was interesting, and she did a good job with it! I had trouble writing my letter back, though, because it was hard to pinpoint exactly what needed changed. She needed to make her meta-ness more clear to the audience, but it was hard for me to pinpoint ways she could do a better job with that. She was also writing in this stream-of-consciousness style that she actually pulled off really well for the most part, but I'm not sure she was intentionally using stream of consciousness or if that's just what ended up happening. So I talked to her about stream of consciousness, warned her that it's not common in English 101 writing, and that it takes a lot of mental power on the part of the audience to understand it. That said, I picked out a couple places where her stream of consciousness made some logical jumps that I couldn't follow.
It was an odd paper. My cynical side said, "of course you would get something so complicated for your first for realz email consultation!" Ah well.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Time
I've been thinking about this research topic of ours. I'd really like to focus on something about the relationship between the writer and consultant, because that's always intriguing to me, and it's something that changes slightly with every appointment.
At the moment, I'm thinking a lot about an appointment I had last week. He was working on a reflection of his academic goals for a General Studies class, and his writing style was very odd. He used a TON of passive voice, and seemed to be prone to using a thesaurus, picking out a nice word, and using that word without looking up its definition and connotation. We ended up working on his word choice a lot, which both of us really seemed to enjoy--it was something that he really wanted to learn how to do. We had a 1/2 hour appointment and a 6 page paper, which was quite a time crunch. What we ended up doing was getting through the first two pages or so working very in depth on each sentence and word to make it say exactly what he wanted it to. At that point, were were both very caught up in the appointment. I realized it had been a while, and went to sneak a look at the clock, only to realize that someone had appropriated my table's clock. I went to check my watch, and then remembered that I lost it a while back. So I had a mini panic attack, because it really felt like we'd been at it a while and I didn't have any way of telling exactly how long. I finally had to apologize to my writer and pull out my phone to check the time, realizing that we still had 10 minutes left.
How very odd. It seemed like we'd been sorting through this paper for much longer than 20 minutes.
Then, later, I was reading through some Writing Center Journal articles and got to Anne Ellen Geller's "Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in the Writing Center. As I read through this idea of letting events drive time instead of vice-versa, I was reminded of this appointment. What Geller seems to be referencing is this kind of experience--getting caught up in the moment and the writer's needs. It reminded me of Csikszentmihalyi's idea of a "flow experience," which we've been talking about in one of my education classes. This idea of letting oneself get caught up in learning (or consulting) without checking the clock every few seconds is intriguing and attractive to me.
At the moment, I'm thinking a lot about an appointment I had last week. He was working on a reflection of his academic goals for a General Studies class, and his writing style was very odd. He used a TON of passive voice, and seemed to be prone to using a thesaurus, picking out a nice word, and using that word without looking up its definition and connotation. We ended up working on his word choice a lot, which both of us really seemed to enjoy--it was something that he really wanted to learn how to do. We had a 1/2 hour appointment and a 6 page paper, which was quite a time crunch. What we ended up doing was getting through the first two pages or so working very in depth on each sentence and word to make it say exactly what he wanted it to. At that point, were were both very caught up in the appointment. I realized it had been a while, and went to sneak a look at the clock, only to realize that someone had appropriated my table's clock. I went to check my watch, and then remembered that I lost it a while back. So I had a mini panic attack, because it really felt like we'd been at it a while and I didn't have any way of telling exactly how long. I finally had to apologize to my writer and pull out my phone to check the time, realizing that we still had 10 minutes left.
How very odd. It seemed like we'd been sorting through this paper for much longer than 20 minutes.
Then, later, I was reading through some Writing Center Journal articles and got to Anne Ellen Geller's "Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in the Writing Center. As I read through this idea of letting events drive time instead of vice-versa, I was reminded of this appointment. What Geller seems to be referencing is this kind of experience--getting caught up in the moment and the writer's needs. It reminded me of Csikszentmihalyi's idea of a "flow experience," which we've been talking about in one of my education classes. This idea of letting oneself get caught up in learning (or consulting) without checking the clock every few seconds is intriguing and attractive to me.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
It's Thursday, and I just realized I completely spaced posting last week...
Yeeahh. Had a super full weekend in which I took off out of town literally right after my shift at the Center (actually, I had to get someone to cover the last hour of my shift) on a retreat with my church group.
BUT, last week was our first week fully on schedule! I had an interesting mix of appointments. First up was a 1000 word long movie review assignment that my poor writer was super flustered about. She had about a page of tentative reviewing written, most of which was taken up by a super in-depth summary of the entire movie, which was really obviously a desperate attempt to fill up her length requirement. This session ended up being very successful--most of her problem was that she just didn't know what to include in a movie review, so we talked about some ideas there. She left feeling optimistic and I left feeling quite cheerful and satisfied.
My second appointment was a required visit: one of the mathematician timelines we've been getting a lot of. I honestly had trouble helping this writer, except for some very quickly and easily generated ideas on what to talk about in his two paragraphs and a quick review of the format for his works cited. The session ended up only being 15 minutes long--I literally had nothing more to say. This writer was not particularly engaged, and no matter how many times I tried to get questions or ideas out of him, he answered with a minimum amount of words and then we had an awkward silence. About 5 attempts later, he pulled out his phone to answer a text and I decided we were done. I talked to Max about it afterward, because he commented on how short the appointment was, and he suggested that maybe I would have done well to have him do some freewriting. I will keep that in mind, as I'm sure this wasn't the last such appointment I'll ever have.
On Friday, I was only in the Center for an hour before I had to skedaddle, and it was taken up by an hourlong appointment with Mike Tam. This session was focused entirely on a line-by-line run through of his argumentative paper. My red flags were waving about focusing on LOCs, but in this instance I feel like that's what he really needed. He told me that he's had some head trauma and has a really hard time transferring his thoughts into coherent writing, and I could totally see that. Most of his sentences were fragments or run-ons, and often didn't have a subject or a verb. We figured out that it was most helpful if I read out loud, since he could hear what was wrong with a sentence if someone else was reading it--he just added in the missing words or completely re-worded it if he read it himself, and he made so many changes that I couldn't keep up with him to make those revisions on the paper. What we did instead was have me read a sentence out loud, and he would say, "no, that isn't right." Then I would have him say what he really meant and I would type it for him exactly as he said it (we were working on his laptop.) Then, if there were still issues I would read it out loud again and we would rinse and repeat. It was a super slow process, but ultimately effective. We also talked about his organization and rearranged some paragraphs. At the end of our hour, we had made some reasonable progress, he went away satisfied, and I was pretty exhausted.
After that, I took off for my two-hour drive to Cascade, and Zach covered the second hour of my shift. His reward is to be my BFF.
BUT, last week was our first week fully on schedule! I had an interesting mix of appointments. First up was a 1000 word long movie review assignment that my poor writer was super flustered about. She had about a page of tentative reviewing written, most of which was taken up by a super in-depth summary of the entire movie, which was really obviously a desperate attempt to fill up her length requirement. This session ended up being very successful--most of her problem was that she just didn't know what to include in a movie review, so we talked about some ideas there. She left feeling optimistic and I left feeling quite cheerful and satisfied.
My second appointment was a required visit: one of the mathematician timelines we've been getting a lot of. I honestly had trouble helping this writer, except for some very quickly and easily generated ideas on what to talk about in his two paragraphs and a quick review of the format for his works cited. The session ended up only being 15 minutes long--I literally had nothing more to say. This writer was not particularly engaged, and no matter how many times I tried to get questions or ideas out of him, he answered with a minimum amount of words and then we had an awkward silence. About 5 attempts later, he pulled out his phone to answer a text and I decided we were done. I talked to Max about it afterward, because he commented on how short the appointment was, and he suggested that maybe I would have done well to have him do some freewriting. I will keep that in mind, as I'm sure this wasn't the last such appointment I'll ever have.
On Friday, I was only in the Center for an hour before I had to skedaddle, and it was taken up by an hourlong appointment with Mike Tam. This session was focused entirely on a line-by-line run through of his argumentative paper. My red flags were waving about focusing on LOCs, but in this instance I feel like that's what he really needed. He told me that he's had some head trauma and has a really hard time transferring his thoughts into coherent writing, and I could totally see that. Most of his sentences were fragments or run-ons, and often didn't have a subject or a verb. We figured out that it was most helpful if I read out loud, since he could hear what was wrong with a sentence if someone else was reading it--he just added in the missing words or completely re-worded it if he read it himself, and he made so many changes that I couldn't keep up with him to make those revisions on the paper. What we did instead was have me read a sentence out loud, and he would say, "no, that isn't right." Then I would have him say what he really meant and I would type it for him exactly as he said it (we were working on his laptop.) Then, if there were still issues I would read it out loud again and we would rinse and repeat. It was a super slow process, but ultimately effective. We also talked about his organization and rearranged some paragraphs. At the end of our hour, we had made some reasonable progress, he went away satisfied, and I was pretty exhausted.
After that, I took off for my two-hour drive to Cascade, and Zach covered the second hour of my shift. His reward is to be my BFF.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
First week on the clock
It's been an interesting week, for sure. I've had an ESL writer, a grad student, and two APA papers. None of which are particularly in my comfort zone. Sooo, they had mixed results, but overall it was a successful first week.
I'm still thinking about the ESL appointment. It didn't go so well, because I ended up at cross-purposes with the writer but I didn't know what else to do. He came in wanting help on how to expand the ideas in his paper, of which he had 3 out of 6 pages written with the rough draft due that day. I started reading it, and immediately realized that he had a lot of grammar issues. Sentences without verbs, run-ons, etc, that worked together to make a paper that was incredibly hard to follow. So, I found myself working on that sentence-level stuff that was so overwhelming. But what he wanted help with was expanding his ideas. We did talk about that at the end, but I could tell that he was frustrated on how much of the session we spent re-writing nearly every sentence. We both walked away from that appointment frustrated, but I don't know what else I should have done...
Other than that, my consultations this week went really well. I had a grad student come in with a literature review for a 500 level Health Science class. My experience with lit reviews amounts to proofreading one my mom wrote once. So, all I really knew about them is that it's somewhere between a research paper and an annotated bibliography (I think!). I asked her to explain the assignment to me, and then we started in on her paper. I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I could help when both the type of writing and the subject matter were so far over my head. But we still worked on things like re-ordering her paragraphs and picking out ideas that needed more explaining (after I asked stuff like "is this a concept that someone in your field would understand without much explaining from you?"). I was immensely satisfied with that session.
My other APA paper was a woman that came in wanting help with citations. This was alarming to me because I have only ever written one paper with APA and I'm reasonably sure I did it wrong. So I went and grabbed the style manual and set to work figuring out how to cite a quote she found in one of her sources that was from another source. I told her the best and least complicated thing to do would be to find the original source, but she sort of ignored me when I said that. So we figured out how to do it, and she went away happy.
Basically, I'm pretty satisfied with this week.
I'm still thinking about the ESL appointment. It didn't go so well, because I ended up at cross-purposes with the writer but I didn't know what else to do. He came in wanting help on how to expand the ideas in his paper, of which he had 3 out of 6 pages written with the rough draft due that day. I started reading it, and immediately realized that he had a lot of grammar issues. Sentences without verbs, run-ons, etc, that worked together to make a paper that was incredibly hard to follow. So, I found myself working on that sentence-level stuff that was so overwhelming. But what he wanted help with was expanding his ideas. We did talk about that at the end, but I could tell that he was frustrated on how much of the session we spent re-writing nearly every sentence. We both walked away from that appointment frustrated, but I don't know what else I should have done...
Other than that, my consultations this week went really well. I had a grad student come in with a literature review for a 500 level Health Science class. My experience with lit reviews amounts to proofreading one my mom wrote once. So, all I really knew about them is that it's somewhere between a research paper and an annotated bibliography (I think!). I asked her to explain the assignment to me, and then we started in on her paper. I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I could help when both the type of writing and the subject matter were so far over my head. But we still worked on things like re-ordering her paragraphs and picking out ideas that needed more explaining (after I asked stuff like "is this a concept that someone in your field would understand without much explaining from you?"). I was immensely satisfied with that session.
My other APA paper was a woman that came in wanting help with citations. This was alarming to me because I have only ever written one paper with APA and I'm reasonably sure I did it wrong. So I went and grabbed the style manual and set to work figuring out how to cite a quote she found in one of her sources that was from another source. I told her the best and least complicated thing to do would be to find the original source, but she sort of ignored me when I said that. So we figured out how to do it, and she went away happy.
Basically, I'm pretty satisfied with this week.
Friday, September 30, 2011
First Consultation!
I'd been wondering if I would get a consultation before I was officially on the clock, because a few other 303ers have. So I came in on Tuesday, and got one! There I was, feeling simultaneously excited and terrified for next week, and then I got catapulted in a bit early.
I was much less nervous than I thought I would be, which was cool. The writer was working on a personal essay, which is totally my forte. That was awesome, and it made me less twitchy. I'd had myself half-convinced I'd have an hour-long appointment for a paper about quantum physics for my first consultation. But, it went really well, and it helped that the writer was really friendly and open and had quite a good first draft.
Anyways, we worked on re-writing his conclusion and breaking up his page-and-a-half long paragraphs full of beautiful descriptions and wandering ideas. He was really a good writer--his topic was great and well thought out, and I was a bit jealous of his skill with descriptive writing. He seemed insecure about his own writing skill, though. It was his first time writing a personal essay, and he seemed suspicious that I wasn't telling him to completely rewrite.
Overall, it was a fun appointment. His paper was about going kayaking in Hawaii, so it was full of all sorts of Hawaiian words that he had to tell me how to pronounce as I read through his paper. We laughed about how bad I was at it, which did a lot to help me feel more comfortable. I like laughing. :)
I was much less nervous than I thought I would be, which was cool. The writer was working on a personal essay, which is totally my forte. That was awesome, and it made me less twitchy. I'd had myself half-convinced I'd have an hour-long appointment for a paper about quantum physics for my first consultation. But, it went really well, and it helped that the writer was really friendly and open and had quite a good first draft.
Anyways, we worked on re-writing his conclusion and breaking up his page-and-a-half long paragraphs full of beautiful descriptions and wandering ideas. He was really a good writer--his topic was great and well thought out, and I was a bit jealous of his skill with descriptive writing. He seemed insecure about his own writing skill, though. It was his first time writing a personal essay, and he seemed suspicious that I wasn't telling him to completely rewrite.
Overall, it was a fun appointment. His paper was about going kayaking in Hawaii, so it was full of all sorts of Hawaiian words that he had to tell me how to pronounce as I read through his paper. We laughed about how bad I was at it, which did a lot to help me feel more comfortable. I like laughing. :)
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Another Observation!
I had another interesting observation with Kelsey this Friday. Somehow, this student had escaped ever learning (or at least he didn't remember learning) the 5 paragraph essay. He got away with it for two years of college, until an English professor handed back his essay and said, "rewrite. I want a 5 paragraph essay."
Alrighty. The format is simple enough, so Kelsey explained it. She scanned through his previous essay and then the beginnings of the rewrite, and quickly realized that it was all well and good to explain the 5 paragraph essay, but what this writer really needed to do was focus his thoughts. He had several different topics he wanted to talk about, but nothing nice and overarching with which to make a thesis. So Kelsey spent a half hour on a nice brainstorming session, no matter that he already had an essay written.
The writer seemed very involved in the session, very earnest. He seemed bewildered that he'd gotten an essay handed back, and couldn't quite figure out what he'd done wrong. He sort of tried to get Kelsey to agree with him that grading papers is "totally subjective," (read: It's the professor's fault that he didn't like it) and Kelsey did a good job of explaining that yes, responding to writing is always a subjective thing, but that there were ways to correctly organize a paper and ways to do it incorrectly (at least where a 5 paragraph essay is concerned).
Alrighty. The format is simple enough, so Kelsey explained it. She scanned through his previous essay and then the beginnings of the rewrite, and quickly realized that it was all well and good to explain the 5 paragraph essay, but what this writer really needed to do was focus his thoughts. He had several different topics he wanted to talk about, but nothing nice and overarching with which to make a thesis. So Kelsey spent a half hour on a nice brainstorming session, no matter that he already had an essay written.
The writer seemed very involved in the session, very earnest. He seemed bewildered that he'd gotten an essay handed back, and couldn't quite figure out what he'd done wrong. He sort of tried to get Kelsey to agree with him that grading papers is "totally subjective," (read: It's the professor's fault that he didn't like it) and Kelsey did a good job of explaining that yes, responding to writing is always a subjective thing, but that there were ways to correctly organize a paper and ways to do it incorrectly (at least where a 5 paragraph essay is concerned).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)