Primary Consultant #4

In addition to realizing that I didn't have enough weekly blog posts, I also realized that despite having several sessions a week for about three months straight, I have neglected posting primary consultant descriptions. So here's a #4 from about two weeks ago.

I met with a Lyman Briggs student for a gender and society paper. That was a first for me. I believe he was an international student, but he had a solid grasp on the general grammatical concepts of English, so nothing of that nature was a concern for me. I liked that he was very engaged with the session from the get-go and very clear about his goals. He wanted help with organization and would like a different perspective on whether or not everything seemed relevant and useful to his topic/thesis.

His thesis was buried a page and a half into the paper. I asked him what his professor's position on thesis placement was, and he said that she preferred the thesis to appear at least in the first three-quarters of the page, so he accordingly asked for help to cut it down. But that's three-quarters of a page. So I tried to look at the validity of his introduction and how it related, exactly, to his thesis. The first page didn't! I asked him how it correlated, and he saw for the first time that it didn't, so he cut an entire page, which left him room to expand on his conclusion.

I think by the end, he was pretty much done with it. We went paragraph by paragraph and made sure each somehow related and the point was clear and well-developed. I don't think he was very used to the topic nor the writing style, being a scientific writer in Lyman Briggs, so by the end he was surely mentally exhausted. But I feel he was satisfied with the work we put into it, and we set a few goals together for him to accomplish. So that was exciting.

I like that I've been able to assert authority in sessions but have taken plenty of steps back for the client to brainstorm solutions to potential problems. I've had a lot of trouble maintaining that balance, and his enthusiasm particularly made me realize that interaction, although dependent on both parties, can be facilitated by a non-directive but nonetheless leader-ish consultant.

Creative Remix Commentary

So apparently I've been imagining keeping up with weekly blog posts and describing sessions and projects. Go me.

Last Monday, the class utilized a few techniques to help critique creative writing pieces. One involved assigning colors to one of the five senses and going through the other's paper going crazy with rainbows; the other involved cutting up your poem or story or what have you and putting it back together to either elicit a different effect or to change up the dialogue and chronology.

Neither particularly helped me revise the story or look at it from a different perspective. Maybe it's just because I'm not that creative or I can't access my "creative gene," but either way, I didn't find either useful...and honestly, I haven't been able to make any kind of substantial change to my creative piece, which is a nonfiction narrative. And that's frustrating. The lack of significant feedback I've had on my pieces, other than the notecards, have inhibited my progress for revision. But I'm trucking. Whatever that means.

Turning in our Literacy Project

I enjoyed writing the first part of our literacies project, the literacies narrative. But after I created my literacies movie I realized that there were a few things I deemed vital to my literacy that I had left out of the narrative because I had not thought of them at the time. I went back and added those few small details. Otherwise I did not know what to change about my narrative, I was a little confused by Trixie's comment that I make my narrative a more creative piece... I had broken my narrative into the three basic groups I saw as most important in my literacy and yes there ended up being three parts which turned into my paper being a standard five paragraph essay. I am unsure of how to go about forcing my paper to be a creative piece when the final part of our literacies project is a creative writing piece. So to solve my dilemma I went back through my narrative and I broke up my large paragraphs into smaller paragraphs. This seemed to help the flow of my paper and I'm hoping this is somewhat how Trixie wanted me to revise my paper.

The mutlimedia literacies project was the hardest one for me to do. It was very time consuming but I didn't mind that part of it. What I did find frustrating was that I was unable to manipulate the movie and images as much as I wanted to. I couldn't figure out how to length the time of a clip or shorten the time of another clip. Then, the day before we were supposed to present our projects, all of my clips disappeared from my movie strip. The movie program I was using told me that they didn't have the right coding. So I had to re-do my entire project! I was furious and confused. There was no reason for my clips to disappear like that, they had worked all the other times I had opened the project and edited it. Now it's time for us to turn them in as finished projects, but I'm afraid to change anything about my movie for fear that my clips will be deleted and I will have to try to re-do it a third time. If I was certain I could change my project without harm, I would add in text to tell whats going on in my movie, much like Jenna's project. I wouldn't want to do a voice over because that is not how I imagine my movie going. I like having the music to flow with the images. A different style I saw was having multiple songs, I thought that was really cool. But again, I'm too scared to change anything about my movie.

It seems almost impossible to go about changing my creative piece of the literacies project because I made a poem and my poem had a rhyme scheme and a set design. The lines are repeated as follows: ABCD BEDF EGFH .... ZAYC. Therefore the lines all have to go together from one stanza to the next. If I were to change just one line I would subsequently have to change that stanza and the one following it and depending on those changes I might have to change the entire poem. Personally I like the way my poem reads and after making a few adjustments of the rhyming words from the input of others in our class, I am happy with the poem the way it is.

I had a lot of fun working on these three parts and watching how my project changed from one to the next. Overall I found it to be a very beneficial experience but I had a hard time trying to revise my pieces due to either little input or technical problems.

The literacies project

This weekend I went to the movies and I watched Twilight, now I had read the book when it first came out and had been waiting for a movie to be made of it for the past, and I kid you not, the past four years. I was very curious as to how the a movie could be made out of such a detailed book, now the descriptions in the book were very easily applicable to the big screen but there was so much to the story I knew they could keep all of it in a movie script. I thought of the Harry Potter movies, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even Pride and Prejudice. When ever a story goes from print to script there are bound to be sacrifices made of characters, plot, and other such things. Yet, I still held onto the belief that Twilight would be the exception to the rule. The book was already a movie for one's eyes to read! Therefore, should the movie just follow the book to an almost exact copy? Sometime, earlier this year the author released the pictures of who had been casted to play the roles in the movie. I was astounded. None of the characters looked like I had imagined in the book or even like the images of actors the author herself had chosen to show us on her website of how the characters looked to me. From that moment on I knew the movie was going to prove to be a great disappointment to me. My boyfriend took me to the movie the weekend it came out and the whole time I watched it, I couldn't stop my brain from comparing every aspect of the movie to the book and how greatly it had failed the book in my opinion. I talked to my cousin and she agreed that the movie was not what she expected. She proceeded to tell me that she and her friends had decided that you can't compare the movie to the book. With this new knowledge in hand I went to the see the movie a second time this past weekend. I made sure that while watching the film I didn't in anyway let my mind compare it to the book. I ended up really liking the movie via this method. That's when it occurred to me that the way the movie had been taken from page to script was the same way we had taken our literacy narative from a written essay style to a mutlimedia. The movie was just a visual representation of the book, not truly the book as a movie, just like my literacies movie was a visual representation of my literacies narative. They weren't exact copies of each other, some information had been deleted and other parts added to make my movie the best explanation of my literacies as I found possible.

Satellite Observation 2

I went to the BCC for my second satellite observation. I walked in convinced that because this was a business writing center and that it was primarily for business students that somehow the material, client, tutor, and session would all be vastly different from either the Bessey or the library. I was wrong. The session I observed could have taken place at either Bessey or the library, the concerns were the same for the client and the solutions were the same for tutor. I was very impressed by how smoothly the tutoring style we learned in Bessey can be applied with only slight differences to the business center. The client came in with questions about grammar and the tutor explained that grammar isn't the main concern of the writing center, the writing style is. The tutor worked through the paper with the student pointing out sentences that didn't make sense, paragraphs that weren't in the best order, and other such problems. She also addressed a reoccurring grammar problem, the student had some trouble staying in the same tense within a paragraph. The client seemed pleased with the way the session had gone and the tutor was happy too. I guess what most surprised me in the BCC were the ESL students and TV. I'm not sure why I thought that the BCC would have fewer ESL students than we receive in Bessey, but I was incorrect in this assumption. The TV was something I wasn't that big of a fan of. I have trouble concentrating on what I'm reading if there is background noise to interrupt my attention. Even when I'm in Bessey, if their is another session going on at the same table I'm at, I have to tune out the other tutor and client so that I can give my client all of my attention; therefore extra noise proves very distracting for me.

Leading a session

Right before Thanksgiving break, I had a client who wanted me to look at her personal statement. She was applying to Wayne State to be a grad student and wanted to get into speech pathology. I'd never worked with personal statements before, and the client didn't give me anything very specific that she wanted to work on. As we read through the first page of her paper, (which was only two pages, the max length) I wondered what on earth I was going to talk to her about. She made only a few sentence-level errors (like inconsistent capitalization of Master's degree--kind of important in this context I think), but the only thing I really wished I could tell her was to develop some of her thoughts more. But, since her paper was already as long as it was allowed to be, that wasn't possible. Fortunately, I finally realized that her conclusion was really where we needed to work on things. It was short and glossed over her goals very briefly. As I started to talk to her about things I'd noticed, everything got much easier. It turns out she was confused about how exactly to say these things about herself that she wanted her audience to read. She knew what she wanted to say but felt she had worded it badly in her paper. So we had a discussion about the types of adjectives she'd used and if those were really the ones she wanted to include to describe herself (some were rather vague). We talked about whether it was important or not to say that she'd studied abroad (we concluded yes, it was). We re-read her paper and trimmed some of the superfluous bits in the beginning to make a little more room for her conclusion, and slowly both of us seemed to feel a lot better about what was getting done in this session. By the time we finished, I felt like I was reading a detailed, organized, well-written personal statement, and my client thanked me and told me I'd really helped her. I've heard that a few times before, but I'm always so glad to hear it.

3rd leading session/ outside observation

Last week I had my third leading session and it was also my first time working with graduate students. I worked with two students who were working on a final paper, a collaboration of 16-20 pages. The students had only began the first part of their paper, a rough 6 pages. I was a little nervous when I began looking at their paper, but I concentrated on the orginization and clarity of their work. It was a little difficult for me because I wanted to see what the rest of their paper would be. It did take the full hour to go over what they had brought. They seemed relieved at the end of the session but stressed out at the same time. One of the students was a little older with a family at home and seemed stressed out about meeting up with the other girl. They were each taking turns writing sections and then trying to mold them together into one long paper. I showed them how to use googledocs, which I find to be an easier way to collaborate, and they both seemed interested in using the site.

A few weeks ago I observed at the BBC library. I had never been inside this library before and it did take me a few minutes to find where to go. I did like the environment at the BBC library, but I think I may prefer the hectic pace at the main Library or the awesome location of Bessey Hall in relation to my apartment and my classes. The observation was somewhat shorter than what I am used to, maybe only twenty minutes. A student brought in a three page paper for his IAH class. He read it out loud for the consultant finding a couple grammatical error. The student did not have a very strong thesis for his paper. The consultant had him rewrite it by looking at the overall content of his paper. He asked him what exactly he wanted to state in his thesis and gave the student time to write a different one. There was also an area where the student forgot to cite his information. The organization of the content was written well. The student left a few minutes early so he could make it to his next class on time. He seemed happy with what they had worked on, and the consultant suggested making another appointment if he wanted to before the final draft was due.