March 18-22

       I actually managed to have a full day of appointments and walk-ins this Monday! The other days were devoid of activity, as usual, however I'm expecting things to pick up as final paper assignments are handed out and we approach finals week. But back to Monday. Three full appointments, two for assignments that I myself am, or was, working on. So needless to say I was familiar with the details of those assignments and capable of helping the students that came in (personal friends of mine). The third, well second technically, appointment I had was a bit of a different story. 
       The paper that the student had was a business ethics paper, and they were having trouble with citations, grammar, and a clear thesis. As per usual, I asked if there were any places in particular they wanted us to look at, after I read their introduction to see where their paper was coming from, of course. The session went on in a fashion of what I like to call a partial success: everything is working, - I'm talking and the student is listening, responding, and occasionally editing their paper - but there is a communication blockage where they might be trying to tell me something that I'm not getting or vice versa. When we started, my first impressions were that the student was at the writing center because their professor told them they had to be, but as we went on, that impression changed. I did fully believe that they wanted to be there to fix their paper, or work on it at the very least. It's possible that part of the writing process, talking with someone they didn't know and trying to explain what they thought was wrong with their paper, was causing some difficulty for them. A kind of difficulty with finding the right words to fix something when I would point out an area for edit.
        Such sessions are not new, and I always do my best to encourage engagement and growth when I see someone having trouble. On several occasions did I sit back and allow there to be silence when the student needed to think. I waited for them to take some time to work on an edit themselves, working through some of the awkward sounding areas that I had pointed out. I think that the session ended well, despite the bumps along the way, and I hope to see them back in the writing center - I could use more practice on business papers.

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