Majoring on Minors

Today I feel like I witnessed an extreme case scenario on what NOT to do as a writing consultant.  Brace yourselves people.

The student didn't bring a hard copy of his paper but rather his laptop, and as my consultant had neither read nor printed the paper, she proceeded to work with him from the copy on his computer.  Harmless right?  WRONG!  After she gave the paper a once over (silently), she made a few comments on the lack of a thesis in the intro paragraph, which engaged the student in a brief discussion of what the teacher mentioned in the writing assignment.  Subsequently, my consultant asked what the student wanted to work on for the paper--grammar, syntax, concepts, or everything--to which the student, looking confused, responded, "Everything, I guess."  The consultant immediately dives into the paper, going sentence by sentence (with full control of the laptop and keyboard) deleting words and punctuation, changing words to what she would rather say ("I'd definitely say 'would' instead of 'could' here," as she simultaneously inserted her alteration) and completely restructuring sentences, with little to no input from the student besides a response of "okay" or "yeah."  At one point, she mentioned that a particular sentence didn't add much to his overall argument, so she just deleted it, without the student having said to do so.  What made it worse was that after tinkering with a few sentences in the first paragraph, she mentioned that if she had any suggestions for conceptual items, she would just put them in parenthesis for him to look at later.  I couldn't believe that all this was happening and that all those changes were done on his actual original document--not a copy of the original saved as anothr version, not with tracked changes.  Unbelievable.  The rest of the session proceeded much in this fashion, although toward the latter half of it, she began to engage the student a little more by talking through some things that she thought could improve the paper.

As you can imagine, I was quite disturbed by the way this session went.  There were so many times when I just wanted to stop her and tell her to let him talk and think of ways to improve certain aspects on his own, but I felt that I would have been interrupting the session and that it wasn't my place.  I'm not certain how long she's been a writing consultant, but I don't believe she's new at it.  If that is the case, I think that maybe it would be beneficial for some writing consultants to revisit the material from our Comp Theory class, so that they are actually benefitting the writers instead of handicapping them.  I hope that my consultant doesn't get in trouble for this, but if this is how most of her consultations go then I think some intervention needs to occur at some point to at least bring her focus back to "making better writers."

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
     --Chinese Proverb

"Non-Traditional" Students and Non-Traditional Consultations

After completing the reading for this week, I honestly feel a bit intimidated about my future position as a writing consultant.  These articles offered a number of issues that I had never considered possibly encountering, such as trying to find the power balance in a consultation with a student who is an elder or trying to maintain a position of neutrality and/or objectivity when faced with a paper that is offensively biased.

Personally, I don't really know how I would have handled any of the situations presented in the readings.  And just the thought of my uneasiness with these predicaments makes me question my capability as a consultant.  Of course, after reading Sherwood's article on failures in consulting, I understand the success as a consultant is a process and will definitely come with its shortcomings.  Nevertheless, even after reading these articles, I still can't quite say with confidence how I would approach a number of the situations presented. 

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." --Yogi Berra

Shadowing Success

I just realized that with all of the homecoming festivities, I forgot to blog about my shadowing experience on Thursday.  However, the forgetfulness on my part is not at all a reflection of my shadowing session, because it was really great.

First, my consultant and I were actually on the same page, so she was in the Writing Center at the proper time, and, thankfully for me, she had an appointment at that hour.  What made it better was that I knew the student she was consulting as well, so she was very comfortable with me observing--so much so that she unhesitatingly included me in the consultation by allowing me to read over the prompt and article used after the consultant had finished reading them.

There were lots of things that went well in the session; however, a couple of things my consultant did seemed to be in direct conflict with some of the points we have learned in class.  The first was that she took a few minutes to read over the student's paper (for the first time, it seemed), and she read it silently.  The other thing that really sent up a red flag was that my consultant was pretty familiar with some of the texts, so she included her opinion about the content much more frequently than I thought she would.  I understand that as consultants we want to target global corrections, but some of the comments the consultant made were entirely reflective of her own opinion, perspective, and interpretation of the material.

Of course, nobody is perfect, and consultants are in that number.  I look forward to observing other consultations to see if my consultant's nature with this student is a consistent thing, or if it was just a simple slip into dialogue and expression with a friend (which the two were).

Article on English

When I went home for fall break, my mom said she had come upon this article and saved it for me.  I thought it was pretty funny and thought the class might find it interesting in the context of our course.  Enjoy!  :)

**You will probably need to change your zoom level (found at the bottom right hand of your browser window) to read it. 



The Importance of Communication

Yet again I was left waiting by myself in the Writing Center yesterday, and after 20 minutes, I decided to finally leave.  While waiting, I had e-mailed my consultant to address the situation of both last week and this week--in the nicest way possible, of course.  I had been really frustrated, though, because I actually leave work early to go shadow, and after waiting in hopes that she would show up, there was no time left for me to return to work. 

Anyway, she responded to my e-mail--with lots of apology--later in the evening.  She said she had completely forgotten about my shadowing on Thursdays, and therefore failed to let me know that her appointment had requested to meet in the library.  She did say, though, that she would be sure it would not happen again.

I'm glad that we're both on the same page now, but I really wish these things could have been ironed out earlier.  Looking back on the past few weeks, I feel as if I should have just e-mailed my consultant in a proactive manner so that it would never get to the point where I would need to be reactive.  This whole situation has highlighted for me the ever-present importance of effective communication.  Without it, life really ends up more difficult than it should be.

Shadowing

I am disappointed again because I still have yet to witness a writing consultation.  The person I am shadowing apparently made flight plans a while back and had to rearrange all of her appointments for yesterday, but I guess it slipped her mind to inform me.  There is usually no one else in the Writing Center when I go, so there were no other opportunities to potentially observe a consultation.  I'm really hoping that next week I'll be able to see what goes on in a writing consultation so that I can better understand what we are discussing in the course and what I will be expected to do in the future.

College Consultation

Today I Skyped my brother--a senior in high school--to talk about college and the college essay.  It was really interesting because at first all of his ideas and statements were so formulaic--like I was interviewing him for a job or something.  So after a little while of hearing that, I just told him to talk to me as me, not like I was an interviewer.  It was hard at first for him to break out of that mind set, but after I prompted him with a few questions about specific examples of his qualities, he began to flesh out his statements and add depth to his experiences.  We talked for about an hour, with the majority of the conversation actually focused on college and writing.  Toward the end, I asked him again what I had brough up initially--what he might like to talk about in a college essay of 250-500 words.  His answer this time was very different; he named a few specific experiences that he could talk about respectively in different essays, with his focus being on how those experiences shaped him and his outlook on life or how he exemplified his character through them. 

I hope that I actually accomplished what I was supposed to in my Skype session with him, because I honestly didn't know if I was doing everything that I was supposed to do, or if I was doing too much.