Third Party Observations Three and Four

Session #3

I observed my third session at the main library sattelite.

The client was named "sharon" and she was upper level undergraduate international student of Asain descent. The work that she brought in was a paper for her Journalism class. When she sat down and was asked what she wanted to work on, I believe her quote was: "I would like you to edit my grammar."

Immediatly the consultant did not focus on the paper's grammar, but rather incouraged Sharon to discuss with us her argument and where she went with the paper. After a little coaxing she convinced Sharon to read her paper aloud. After each paragraph the consultant would stop her and reveal the strong aspects of her argument and would discuss the grammar issues that she noticed. Sharon did have a few issues of grammar that surfaced several times throughout her paper. These issues seemed to be consistent with other international students from Asain discent that I have already observed. Sharon had some difficulty with pluralizing and adding possesion to proper nouns. She was also struggleing with appropriate placement of articles.

I felt that the consultant handled this session very well. Although it was obvious that the client only really wanted help with grammar the consultant was able to focus on more substance issues like structure and argument layout, while still adressing the grammar. The consultant would find a sentence that did not sound correct, and would simply ask: "Something seems a little wrong here...what do you think it could be?" By doing this she allowd the consultant to find her own mistakes. When the consultant did reveal grammar issues on her own she was sure to explain why something worked the way it did. This way the writer could learn from her mistakes so that she does not coninue to make the same grammar errors over and over. All in all I thought the consultant approached the session in an extremely unathoritative manner and made the best out of a session that in the consultant's mind seemed to start off in an innapropriate direction.


Session #4

I observed my fourth and final third party observation in the student athletic academic center sattelite. This session provided a very different atmosphere than sessions in Bessey or the library, and I would imaging the BCC as well.

Once I entered the center I learned that all student athletes are required to attend study hall in the same building for at least eight hours a week. It is also required that some students (all freshman athletes maybe) are required to do an additional two hours a week of writing center instruction.

I observed a sort of collaborative session where two clients were working on the same WRA assingment so discussed their papers together with two consultants and myself. I allowed myself during this session to add my thoughts when they seemed appropriate, up until now I have said little to nothing. The two clients had a very vague idea of what their assignment was and had done little to no work on it at all.

I was shocked at how unmotivated the two clients were academically. They both seemed very unenthused to be there and it was obvious that this was something they were required to do. Only one of the clients brought the actual assignment sheet and neither of them brought any form of paper or notebook to write in. They did free-writing and outlining on the half sheets of paper that are available in the center. I felt more like I was in a 9th grade language arts class room than a college writing center.

Eventually the session broke into two, because one of the clients realized he had another piece of writing to work on that he thought was more important, and I continued to observe the client that seemed a little more strong-willed and motivated. He was working on creating an outline for his paper and seemed to feel satisfied at the end of the session with the brainstorming and pre-writing that he had completed.

This session did not focus on grammar which was a relief, but still lacked a sense of engagment because of the clients negative attitude towards writing and the assingment in general.