October 29 - November 2

          This week in the writing center was quite busy, much to my delighted surprise. Monday saw two students come to see me, one of which I will be discussing later, and Friday saw a full schedule of appointments - a repeat tutee among them, which in itself is refreshing to see. First off, let's talk about Monday's session. The predominant issue in the paper that the student who came to see me on Monday had was sheer word count. They had a paper that was more than three hundred words over the required maximum. Additionally, they needed help with Chicago style citations, but one short trip to Purdue fixed that quickly enough. No, the struggle that I found was trying to help this student cut out useless language from their paper, and consolidate extra lines of summary without sacrificing meaning or analysis. 
           I noticed while helping in this way that such an exercise is far more difficult when you are trying to be hands off with the paper, as a consultant should never, or at least very rarely, take out the red pen and change something themselves. So a good deal of the session was me reading over a paragraph where I felt there could be some consolidation and asking the student if they heard any sentences that were unnecessary, overly wordy, or that could be absorbed into other sentences. The student was visibly trying to see what was difficult to find, that being their own mistakes or language, and I did my best not to toss out too many suggestions that would be easily grasped upon by the student. It was certainly a learning experience for us both, and while it was difficult, such writing sessions are what make me a better consultant - one that can advise without being too hands on.
           Friday's session - the one with the repeat tutee - was the embodiment of how I believe every session should run, ideally. The student that came in had made an appointment with me last Friday to go over their outline. This Friday, we went over half of the paper - they wanted feedback on the direction they were taking things, if they had enough voice over summary, etc. The student was incredibly vocal, knew what they needed to focus on, and could direct me to areas of their outline or paper that were weak. They are determined to return once more on Monday to show me the completed paper for last minute revisions and feedback. Since this session went so well, there is little for me to say on it other than how reassuring it is as a consultant to get so much in session feedback about how much people like us help. It cements the point made by many consultants that working here is more than just a job, as you can see the effect of your work in the writing brought by students who frequently return to the writing center. Their ideas become more focused, and their writing is made all the better for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday: September 10th

A Political History of Digital Humanities:        This reading, like past readings, seemed to focus on defining what Digital Humanities both is and is not. Digital Humanities prefers lab based research and digital projects to over reading and writing when it comes to studying the humanities. The article also focused extensively on the onset of computers in scholarly learning, the creation of "computer specialists" who were mostly librarians, and their poor worth in the eyes of literary scholars. Jerome McGann and his Rossetti project are mentioned, as well as the necessity of computers in compiling the data required. And in the face of all of this, Digital Humanities is created from the anger and disdain carried by growing Digital Humanists as literary scholars looked down on them. The Scandal of Digital Humanities:       The article was about how people seemed to think that Digital Humanities represented and encouraged Neoliberalism. The aut...
Read more
To my understanding, the reading focused on the reasons for having peer tutoring, as well as why peer tutoring is a beneficial method of teaching. Something I liked in particular about it was the way it questioned, and subsequently answered, why peer tutoring is an effective method of teaching. Not only does this form of teaching benefit those who do not quite understand the material, but in teaching it to others it helps reinforce the material in the minds of the peers doing the teaching. In this way, the text explains to us how peer tutoring is not simply, "the blind leading the blind," but rather students explaining concepts in a language their peers can understand. A question that this poses, however, is the matter of what is the most effective teaching environment if tutoring is such a progressive method of instruction. Does the success of tutoring create a smaller demand for more learned instructors, as all it seems to take is one instructor and several students that gr...
Read more
March 25-29         Activity is starting to speed up in the writing center, if the last two weeks are anything to go on. Just last week, I must have had 4-5 sessions, making about half a week's worth of sessions for me, good for this semester, while this week I got a very similar number, close as I can recall. Friday felt like the busiest time, however, as my short hour and a half slot had both appointments booked, and I filled in for Kensie's last 45 minutes. The sessions I had on Friday were both relatively simple (I even had a return visitor from one of my past sessions, which is always nice), but both sessions revolved around one thing in particular. Works cited pages and in-text citations. In the first case, it was a matter of being unfamiliar with APA format, while the second was having trouble citing non-scholarly sources, such as the page on a gaming website.          The first student brought in a leadership paper, standard fair...
Read more