so many more coming. just wait.

Writing Concerns (Exercise 5B) and other Somesuch Nonsense

Hey, all:

I meant to post this yesterday during class, then later after the next class, then the next, then soon I was at rehearsal and away from all computers. So here's my Exercise 5B response. Read it or don't. Honestly, I don't care. I don't look at my old (2 day old) work.

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The greatest weakness one can have is believing one has none. If one believes oneself perfect, then one has no reason to improve. I'm not saying this is completely true in my case, but I would just like to point this out: complacency breeds error. That's what I've been told. By fortune cookies.

At any rate, I don't see how this can't be true. If somebody isn't constantly being tested, their ability will go dull. Perhaps the real challenge in not having any glaring weakness is learning how to stay in practice, how to keep up the pace so that one never loses his or her edge. In truth, that must be my own glaring weakness; the self-assuredness in my own skill leads me to sloth, quite possibly the greatest sin that a writer can commit.

I imagine much of this comes from the fact that all throughout my academic career, I've honestly never had to “try” to get a good grade. I have always readily retained information easily for homework and exams, and any essay that I've had to write has usually come out well enough for a good grade. I imagine that if I ever was put into an environment where I was surrounded by academic superiors, I would not hold up so well, mentally or otherwise.

One of my greatest weaknesses has indeed been my fear of being upstaged. If I cared enough about a class to try to be the best, anybody better or “more deserving” of the teacher's praise was a potential enemy to be shown up. This was not always the case, but if I felt strongly about the image I had in the minds of both the teachers and my classmates, these feelings would at least come through in my approach and my handling of class-specific situations. This did not always end out well for me, if it ever did at all.

All of this leads up to one greater (and hither-to-unforeseen) disadvantage to being me: pride. Specifically, pride in the face of criticism. And this is not a graceful kind of pride, but rather the kind that made people cringe and turn away when it came to peer reviewing my stuff. Perhaps it was my silent rebukes to any well-intentioned point that they would make; perhaps the opposite, my imperialistic attitude to “liberating” another's paper from the clutches of that very author. Is it any wonder why they sometimes did not take me as seriously as they “should” have? Or am I just over analyzing a very real and helpful technique that clearly served me well in both a demanding academic world and among peers that may not have been skilled as myself? Regardless of however it “went down”, I still do not feel very good about how I acted when it counted.

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Good enough. It's kind of a downer, though. I give it two stars (** out of 4).

Anyway, this week went excellently. I'll post about it more in detail this weekend, probably, if I'm not too busy with the show and catching up on homework/papers that I've had to neglect (grumble grumble). Seeya!

I am America and So Can You

I had my last observation session with a Biblical named fellow today. The client was a graduate student and in the school of education. The session started out with the typical statement of the assignment and the questioning of who the paper's general audience was. As this was a foreign exchange student, her grammatical structure was kind of funky by normal standards. Halfway into the first paragraph there was a problem with comma placement. The following exchange took place:

Haon: I think there is a comma missing here, but I am not sure. Do you know if you would put one here? (directed at me)

Kass(Me): Yeah I normally would.

Client: (To Haon) Uhm...are you American?

Haon: *Blank stare* Yeah I like America

Client: No no...are you american.

Haon: Yeah I support America.

Me: *Laughing to myself in background*

I guess you had to be there but it came out of nowhere and it was like a slap to the face. Other than that the consultations went well. The client refused to discuss the two readings she had to analyze to write her paper, claiming they would be too confusing for us to understand. Had either Noah or I read the paper I would have had some form of an idea for what I was supposed to be helping develop. We had to focus on eliminating the redundant use of the word "goods" from every other sentence of her paper. However many troubles we had tutoring this woman, I still hope to see her around the center again. Who knows, maybe another funny conversation will ensue.

P.S. I realized that I am driven CRAZY by people who chew with their mouths open

Return of the Jedi: Kassidy Solo

AS CONSULTANT NUMBER 2 : : : : : : Overflow at work today. We had discussed a certain PhD client that came to visit whose work I found very intriguing. (<--did I misspell that word?) I had two observations with this same student and felt very comfortable working with her. I helped her analyze and fix problem areas in a piece that was needed for her funding request. It is amazing to see these writings develop, especially since I have seen the paper grow by leaps and bounds in vocabulary choice and the overall rythmic flow. This piece was cut down from over 6 pages to just two. She appeared to nail the highlights of the longer paper.I am really pulling for this certain someone to get their funding approval.

5B or Not 5B: That Is The Question

With People As With Words, Context Matters

by David James Tibergien

Over the past year I have developed a lot as a writer. As someone whose writing was at one time focused toward persuasion, I have become more comfortable as someone who writes to entertain. While I believe that political rhetoric can be entertaining and engaging, my audience and thus my goals as a writer have transformed. I can relate to ESL students in that the writing I used to produce was supposed to be informative and persuasive to a very broad audience without offending or provoking anyone who might disagree with the views expressed. My goals as a creative writer are quite different in the sense that I believe that if I don't provoke thoughts or feelings in my audience, I have done them a disservice. While I am still speaking the same English that I have always spoken, the new goals that I must meet have posed a challenge to all my verbal sensibilities.

I can see where a student who was indoctrinated into an old and inefficient writing process, and who received good grates with poor quality papers in high school might meet a great deal of frustration when trying to write for college instructors that have a great deal more demands for the content and structure of their writing. The demands for these students changes and they might struggle to adapt much they same way I have struggled to adapt my writing.

I have not been successful at fluently picking up another language. I completed a few years of French but I can't speak or write it very well. During my first semester at MSU I took Spanish with a fellow who is perhaps the worst instructor I have had in any class ever. More than half of my Spanish 101 class had taken 2 or more years of Spanish in High School, and a sizable plurality of these folks had taken 4 years of Spanish, there were even a few students who took AP Spanish. The philosophy of the instructor who resembled an Argentinean Steven Colbert has a poor command of English and adopted the teaching philosophy that: because there are very advanced students alongside Spanish Novi, that he should teach somewhere to the middle. Frustrated, I dropped the class.

Because my degree requires that I take two years of a foreign language, I will be starting Portuguese in the fall of 2008. I hope that I won't have to stand out against too many students with a background in Portuguese.

Alas, I can empathie with an ESL student who is expected to learn English by immersion. They no doubt deal with frustrated native English speakers on a regular basis the same way I was met with frustration by advanced Spanish students and the Argentinean Steven Colbert.

I have never failed to start an assignment because of a fear of failure, but there are many times when I failed to start a project because I feared spending my time on something agonizing and unstimulating.

Like virtually every other restless and irreverent young white male boy, I was diagnosed with A.D.H.D. I will say that this is about all I want to discuss in regards to my mental health and cognitive capacity on a public blog.

Literacy Narrative
As I sit down to write I am not scared; I am not discouraged that I will not live up to the challenge placed before me. It was only recently that I realized my ability, however. I used to think that my literacy as a writer was very limited, that I could only complete a piece of writing in certain genres, at certain lengths. As I trace my memory back to the time I learned to write, that’s not what I find. I have always embraced the assignment, no matter what was being asked of me, and I have never fallen short. I like that Bruffee discussed writing as an internal conversation being externalized because it reminded me that writing is a product of my mind, and my mind is the one thing that has never failed me.
I have tried to play countless sports; my coordination is nonexistent. I have tried to play video games; my fingers move, but the character on the screen wanders around aimlessly until he falls into a pit of lava even though I repeatedly told him to jump over it. I am good at math, but only until I reach calculus. I am good at science, but only biology and parts of chemistry, certainly not physics. I have a beautiful voice, but a small range to use it in. I think of literacy as the ability to perform, but also to improve and grow in a field. Different genres of writing may be unexplored by me, but they are not frightening.
I always thought my best kind of writing was the 5-paragraph essay, because that’s all I had practiced. In 8th grade English class, we were told to write a thank you poem to our parents. Some students spent days writing and editing; I spent ten minutes to get the words that immediately popped into my head down on paper and when I showed them to my teacher she was so impressed she picked me as one of three people in the school who got to read their poem aloud at 8th grade graduation. In high school, I thought all I could write was literary analysis papers about Shakespeare and Morrison’s Beloved, but I was wrong. Thinking back, I raised thousands of dollars by writing and performing a killer speech that I performed in front of hundreds of people, I wrote articles for the local newspaper, and I made my vice principal cry when I showed her my college admissions essay. The last few things I wrote in high school were my graduation speech, which was praised by all, my last debate, which crushed the other team, and my I-Search paper, which my writing center advisor wouldn’t get enough of.
I really did think about my literacy as a writer as being very limited, but I couldn’t answer why. Whichever genre I have tried to master I have, and those genres I have yet to take on, I know I can. My writing center and Humanities teacher, Ms. Welker, is the reason I can now admit that I am talented. She encouraged me to enter an essay contest- I won. She encouraged me to keep a journal and read through it. Her few comments read, “Wow” “Captivating” and “This right here shows me you are a writer in every way.” I don’t know yet how far I’ll carry my writing at this point. I plan on practicing law, but I have thought many times about writing a book detailing the last few years of my life. I have suffered a terrible mental disorder, borderline personality disorder, and I feel so far away from everyone else at times that I pick up a pen and write down the feelings inside. Other people can’t feel what I feel, but I feel like they might begin to understand if I can find a way to write it down. I currently keep a journal that details every borderline episode that plagues my day and if nothing else, that is the one piece of my writing I hope people will pick up and read.

its a mad, mad, mad, mad world

this movie title was the question they were looking for on jeopardy yesterday so i thought it fitting...i'm terribly sick. my suitemate looked down my throat and said it was the most disgusting thing she'd ever seen...i left the center early last night and let mike take my 4:00 conference because i was not feeling great and now it hurts to swallow, breathe, talk, etc...i will post my paper tomorrow i promise but i don't think i'll be in class which is soooo sad because this was going to be my first semester of perfect attendance ever in my life. =[  

see you all soon i hope

overdue post about an old observation session and time at the desk

ok, this blog is several days overdue. my apologies.

first, i need to write about an observing session i did with carrie a little while ago. it was with the same client that i had seen with natalie, so i was able to see her progress since about a week before. also, carrie is her instructor for this wra class, so i also got a better idea of what she wanted done for the assignment.

as with the last time, the young woman was very energetic and had to be pushed a little to focus on the assignment, but she was very nice, and really cared about doing a good job on her paper. i think this situation is much better than finding yrself with a client who is more capable of writing, but just doesn't care about working with you to make the paper better. i think the client may need to come in often, just to get used to the writing process, but she seems willing to work hard and learn from her class and the consultants she works with.

now on to the desk:

i've worked the front desk a few times now, and it seems pretty straight-forward; not much to say, other than i've been learning how to do different things with the computer and the phone as i go along, usually by asking whoever is close how to do what i need to do. i also worked on a flier for international writing centers week, and i must say that i am not a fan of indesign, although i'm slowly getting used to it.

that's all for now. more soon.