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.