Things I forgot to write about (aka observations)

I was amazed to look back though my posts and realize that though I took notes on every session I observed (there were seven of them, not including the ones at satellites), I never wrote a blog about any of them. I'm assuming that because I took notes some part of me assumed I'd posted blogs. In any case, now I can write about the sessions I observed from the perspective I had in my notes as well as the perspective I have now as a somewhat experienced consultant.

1st Observation
For my first observation, I sat in with two grad students. The consultant was not particularly friendly to me, which made me nervous about asking other consultants if I could shadow them. His client was a little friendlier, though she didn't seem to understand why I was there (the consultant did explain to her, but when he left to make a copy of her paper she asked why I was there again). The paper was one that the client had written last year and a professor had marked up for her. She'd brought it in because she felt she had consistent problems in writing (she was an ESL student, though I could hardly tell because she spoke perfect English). She felt she couldn't make sentences flow within paragraphs and that her organization "didn't make sense," which I assumed meant that the professor had said it didn't make sense. The paper she'd brought was long (she had ten pages but said that wasn't all of it) and the consultant said they'd try to get through as much as possible, which the client didn't seem particularly pleased with. As they read through the paper, I remember thinking that nothing seemed wrong with it. I thought that I was very glad I wasn't conducting this session because I would not know how to help her. When they read through a page, they would stop and go through the things the consultant had marked (he wrote notes on her paper while she was reading). I wasn't sure if writing notes on her paper was a good idea, though he was writing in pencil. Then I thought that taking notes might be helpful, but I also remember thinking that surely he could remember what he needed to talk about for only one page. Now, I feel very differently about those things. First of all, I have learned I cannot take notes while someone is reading his or her paper. I can't write fast enough, and trying to write things down and simultaneously listen to someone reading just isn't possible for me. Either the listening or the writing will be sacrificed. I do, however, make pencil marks by things I want to talk about (usually next to the sentence or paragraph that I want to discuss rather than on the text itself), and I always have to reread pages that I don't mark. I will usually remember if I saw something I want to talk about, but I don't usually remember what it was. I've also learned I have more trouble going longer without discussing things when a client does not have a paper copy of his or her paper. I really do have trouble taking notes, and since there's no text for me to mark when the document is digital, I've had trouble remembering the issues in a paper the few times that I haven't had a paper copy in front of me. Anyway, this grad student client is the same one who came back a couple weeks later and refused to work with me because I wasn't a grad student myself, though I'm sure I could have helped her just fine, especially since I'd heard her work before as well as the ideas that the tutor had about how to help.

2nd Observation
My second observation was also of a grad student client and grad student tutor, though it was a different tutor this time. This consultant/client combination was a lot friendlier, and the session as a whole was more pleasant to sit through. Unlike the first client I'd observed, this client seemed much more open to recognizing and accepting her own problem areas in her work (the first client seemed to need to be convinced that certain things were really problems), and the consultant smiled more and the dialogue between the two seemed more conversational. The tutor from the first session talked more than the client did, which at the time I thought was a bad thing, though now I can see that the client didn't give him much choice. She was reticent and reluctant to discuss her own errors. The client in this second session, however, talked as much if not more than the consultant did, and the session as a whole was encouraging. It made me realize how different one session could be from another, though at the time I still didn't really consider how different I was going to have to be from one session to another in response to the individual and the situation. This session actually lasted two hours, and I ended up taking a lot more notes on the contents of the paper than was necessary. Actually, the contents of the paper weren't really that important at all in the grand scheme of me learning about how to tutor, but I didn't recognize that at the time.

Ist Observation/co-consulting
During this session, I (very fortunately) got to be part of a brainstorming session. I say very fortunately because during the times that I'd been in the Center observing, I'd overheard a couple sessions that dealt with brainstorming but I was very afraid to have a session like that myself. How did one help someone else brainstorm? What if I didn't have any ideas? What if my ideas were stupid, or not really relevant? So, when I asked a consultant if I could help with a session and she said it was brainstorming, I was happy to hear it. The client had to write an opinion piece about an important issue in the upcoming election, but he couldn't decide if he wanted to write about the pro-choice movement or something about alternative energy. At first, I wasn't sure how to contribute to the session, so the other tutor was the only one asking questions. She managed to help him figure out that he was more interested in writing about alternative energy than the pro-life movement. As he talked about the things he was thinking about concerning alternative energy, I finally said that it seemed like he was talking a lot about alternative fuel options for vehicles, though he'd mentioned other things, and maybe that would be something he could consider focusing on for his piece. He seemed to think that was a good idea, which encouraged me enough to feel like I could contribute a few more ideas (which was also aided by the fact that I already knew some relevant information about alternative energy). I still felt then and feel now that I would feel a bit more nervous about brainstorming than I do about a more usual session involving an already-written paper, but at least I got a little bit of experience.

2nd Observation/co-consulting
The second time I co-consulted was not really a good indicator for me about how I would conduct future sessions. I co-consulted with a tutor I'd observed with before, and she was very inclusive of me from the beginning of the process. She printed off three copies of the paper, and I sat at the edge of the table rather than opposite the consultant and client. My problem was that when the client came in, she said her main problem was grammar and mechanics (she was an ESL student, the first one I'd worked with and the second I'd observed), and I took her too literally. Even though we'd talked about things like this in class, although not very much yet at that point. It seemed to me that her main problem really was grammar and mechanics. Her paper seemed organizationally fine and her ideas were there, they were just a bit hard to understand sometimes because of her grammar. I had a number of helpful ideas for how to fix some of the grammar issues, but in the end I really hadn't thought of anything else. I remember thinking after the session that it couldn't even really be possible to focus on more than one thing at a time anyway, and that I would have been in real trouble if I'd had to think about organization or something in addition to catching all the grammar problems. Now, I can think about things more broadly when I'm reading a paper or listening to someone read one. I can mark a consistent grammar issue while still hearing the whole concept of the paper, though I still find it difficult to comprehend the paper as a whole while thinking of individual pieces. At the end of the session, the consultant was very nice about the session, telling me I'd had some good ideas. I probably had had some good ideas, but I wonder now if I would think they were quite as pertinent as I thought they were at the time.