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.
Busy week! Don't worry too much about having a dud required visit appointment. With time and practice you'll get around to developing some super slick ninja moves that the students won't see coming. And don't worry about the session running a bit on the short side--sometimes that happens when the papers are super short (like those timelines).
ReplyDeleteWoo-hoo! You worked with Mike (and Java, I presume)! You're right in that LOCs are okay to work on with him. He comes in all the time and his HOCs get plenty of attention (and it seems that you squeezed some of that work in, too).
Good choice in a new BFF!
mk