Reading reflection and literacy narrative #3

It seems like everything we’ve learned this semester can be distilled down to this: “Be aware that different students have different learning styles and different needs, and adjust your consulting strategies accordingly.” I think Amanda put it pretty succinctly when she said “The best way to work with clients is to pay close attention to their responses, and adapt your communication towards them…” The main goal of our course readings seems to have been to introduce us to these various types of consulting, and help us determine when we should use which ones.

It was fortunate that our reading this week dealt with students with learning disabilities, especially after our staff meeting a few weeks ago with the RCPD. I don’t know if I’ve worked with any students with disabilities earlier this semester, so this week marked the first time I’ve knowingly done so. The student in question was blind in one eye, but she didn’t mention this until twenty minutes into the session. I had noticed that her eyes seemed unusual, but I wouldn’t have guessed that she was visually impaired. When she told me this, she explained that her limited vision made it difficult for her to proofread her own writing. She tended to gloss over typos and small grammatical errors, so having someone else read her writing was critical. Once I had this information, I changed my approach. In addition to asking her general questions about her paper, I took a more directive approach to pointing out surface errors I would otherwise not have focused on. In this case, if I hadn’t known her unique circumstances, I wouldn’t have been able modify my approach to give her the help she needed.

Work on my literacy narrative remix has been going slowly. I have lots of ideas for what I want to include, but I’m having difficulty turning these ideas into a story. I guess I’m pretty weak in the area of plotting. I have trouble setting down a logical order for events to take place in. Usually when I write an academic paper, ideas seem to connect to one another naturally, so I don’t have to think about it consciously. Even though I hope to someday write fiction, to date I don’t have a great deal of experience in that area. I’m actually a little jealous that other people seem to be doing such cool things with this assignment… (Seriously Nina, a cookbook? I wish I had thought of something like that!) Another issue I have to consider is whether or not I want to show this to my family when I see them this week. On one hand, I’d like feedback from people who are familiar with the events I’m describing. On the other hand, I tended to be self-conscious about showing other people my writing in general, and I’m not sure how they would react to reading a story about them. I doubt I could include all of my cousins in this version, and I wouldn’t want people to feel slighted about being “left out.” This dilemma is causing me a whole new level of stress.

Almost there

I asked Trixie if I could start doing my primary consultations during finals week, because everything is due the week before for me! So I'll need to fit in 5 of them. Thinking about being the "primary" consultant is not a scary concept to me anymore, but some of these ideas that we talk about in class seem to work really well for everyone, and I was just wondering how you remember all of these little tricks and tips... Obviously they come with time, but when you guys started consulting, did you just jump right into it? I'm a list-maker. I like having all my options laid out in front of me. Do all of these innovative consulting ideas just pop into your head while you are consulting? Do you forget a solution for a client's problem and remember it after the session? Do you have a little piece of paper you like to keep next to you? Or some favorite worksheets you like to keep on hand? Or reference books you've found extremely helpful and now know their exact location on the bookshelf?

I've been thinking about the things I'll do as a consultant - As a self proclaimed list maker, my consolidated list of do's and tips and tricks are below. Feel free to add on if you guys know some more ideas that I missed!

Things you should always do in a session:

1. Ask them what their paper is about before they even take it out
2. Ask them what they want to focus on - make a list, perhaps
   
3. Ask them to read their paper aloud - yes? great. no? just read it for them
   
4. Don't write too much on the paper, definitely not with a red pen
   
5. Give them notes that they can understand later on
   
6. Share the paper between the two of you, always make sure it's their paper still
   

Tips & Tricks:

1. Do the paragraphs relate, follow the thesis? Make an outline/write down the general idea of each paragraph next to it for them so they can see it
2. Thesis problems? Have them explain what their paper is about without looking at the actual paper and write down what they say
   
3. Keep seeing the same grammar issues? Pick out one, fix it for them and explain it to them, and then have them find the same problem in another part of the paper and fix it
4. Use color to identify similar ideas, etc.
5. Run-on sentence? Say it out loud exactly how they wrote it (and without taking a breath for good measure) and see if they can fix it themselves
6. APA/MLA citation questions? Give them the available worksheets, refer them to the Purdue OWL website, do a few with them if they want
   
7. Problems relating writing concepts to ESL students? use diagrams, examples, markers, etc.
   

Literacy Narrative Part 3

I've been working on Remix 2 of my literacy narrative over the past few days, and it's been an interesting project. I ultimately did decide to write poetry, but in many ways it doesn't contain anything that we heard in our creative writing lecture in class. There is no rhythm or rhyme scheme, inconsistent stanza and line lengths, no symbols, and really no imagery either. I feel like it would be considered a "bad poem" by those standards, but really, it's not a bad poem at all, and I don't think anyone would disagree.

Most of the time when I hear someone call a poem "bad," it's because of the way it was taught in a class--that there HAS to be some hidden meaning that can be dragged out of it, and that meaning is the ONLY valid one. I feel like that's why many people I know say that they hate poetry--because it was taught to them badly. My poem has a story and a meaning behind it, and that's really all you need in a good poem. Actually, you don't even need a story. As long as the poem serves some kind of point (and it's EXTREMELY difficult to write anything at all that doesn't have a point) then it's perfectly valid. And that point is not necessarily the "correct" way to interpret a poem, and it certainly isn't the only way to do it. Any poem will have a number of different meanings to a number of different people, and none of them have to be the same meaning that the author sees in it. That's the problem with so many English classes--a teacher gets hung up on what is ultimately their own interpretation of the poem, and students feel frustrated when they see the poem's meaning in an entirely different way.

So I guess this blog is really just getting back at what many of my peers mentioned in their previous blogs--lecturing about creative writing is not very useless, because everybody will have their own interpretation of any given work, and that interpretation is always completely valid.

First session and creative writing

First session as solo consultant:

This session was completely different than any other session that I have observed or co-consulted on up to this point. The client was a senior undergrad who was working on preparing a resume and a personal statement for medical school applications, although she had no specific schools in mind yet. Because she did not have a specific audience in mind it was difficult to help her brainstorm for a personal statement. We went through her resume and I made some suggestions about changing the order and the layout of the font, but nothing too major. Then we just brainstormed ideas for her personal statement and together we were able to create an outline. The outline showed where she would focus on particular aspects of education or experience information. She acted like this helped her a lot, and told me that the hardest part of writing a paper for her is knowing where and how to start. She seemed to have an idea of that after our session. I attempted to stay for a second session, but the client was not there after 15 mins, so I gave up on them and left.


This week in class:

I found the writings/conversations/focus on special population tutoring pretty interesting. All in all I feel like a tutor should have several different tutoring methods or ideas that they are willing to try, although there will of course be the few that are primarily used and effective. I don't feel there is a need to specify what should be used when, the tutor should just adapt to the session and tutor as best as they can.
Going into the literacy project I fully expected the third part: creative remix, to be my complete least favorite. However, it turns out I was wrong. I decided to write a short story for my piece and I have found it extremely interesting and exciting to write. I took more of a children's literature approach to my story, and I really enjoyed working on it. This was a surprise to me, because until now I have never really enjoyed, or felt at all confident, while writing creatively.

Leading a (not particularly helpful) session

Last Wednesday afternoon when I came into the WC, I checked my clients for the day and discovered that my first client wanted help with a CV and a cover letter. I come in after my first class on Wednesday is finished, so I usually get there and jump right in with my first client. In this case, that meant that I had no time to do a little research about either of these items. I've never written a CV or cover letter or looked over anybody else's either. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a CV at all. In any case, I began to be somewhat concerned about the impending session and thought I should maybe find someone else to help him. When my client came in, I felt even more concerned. He was maybe in his late thirties and looked impatient. Fantastic. Trixie suggested I talk to other tutors to see if anyone could switch, but unfortunately the only tutor who hadn't started her session yet was working with a personal statement, which she said was kind of the same thing. I disagreed, but she didn't seem inclined to switch. So I sat down with my client, who as it turned out was from Israel (he had an accent I hadn't heard yet) and had written both this CV and cover letter awhile ago but had been told at some point recently that neither were very up-to-date or American. I explained to him up front that I was not the best person for this job, being an undergrad who, so far, really hadn't put time into learning either of these genres. I suggested that if he were to come back to the WC, he might consider trying to schedule with a grad student, who would probably have more experience with these types of writing. He opened his CV for me anyway (he had it saved on a flash drive), and I looked at it, but at the end I still had no idea what to tell him. Should he bold all the parts he bolded? Were all those categories really necessary? Is it normal to include your birthplace? I wished I could tell him something useful, but in the end I thought that trying to give him advice could do more harm than good. Trixie gave me some literature about both genres partway through the session, and we looked over those. The client ended up staying for about 40 minutes and then said he would schedule with me again later in the week after he'd had time to implement some of the strategies we'd looked over. I wasn't sure why he wanted to reschedule with me and not with someone else, but as I'd already said my piece I decided to let him do what he wanted. If he did reschedule, he worked with someone else as I didn't work anymore this last week, and I really hope they were able to be more helpful than I was. Since coming to the Center, I've learned some things about APA style and resume writing in case I should need to help someone with those, but Wednesday taught me I need to look for even more unfamiliar genres to (hopefully) prevent the extreme unhelpfulness from happening again.

2nd Session as a Client

I went into the writing center about two weeks ago for another session as a client. I really like the Bessey location, it's close to my home and near all of my classes (3 out of 4 being in Bessey Hall).
I brought in a rough draft of a short informational paper. The tutor I worked with was very friendly and asked me a lot of good questions. When I came in, I had wanted to concentrate on the arrangment of my paper and she drew my attention to other ares such as word choice. There were a few phrases that I thought sounded intelligent but were somewhat confusing to the reader. I decided to eliminate those phrases and re-write them to organize my information clearly. She did tell me my arrangment was clear and logical, which was what I was somewhat worried about. It always helps to have someone else look at your paper. Sometimes I get so involved in what I am working on it's hard to look at the overall product. I did read my paper outloud for her and found one grammatical error, something I had overlooked. I was only there for a half hour, but I felt it was a fairly productive session.

Satellite Observation #2

I completed my second satellite observation at the BCC. I definitely preferred the environment to Bessey, but then again, Bessey has its positives.

The client had brought in his/her cover letter for a TA position, I believe, though it wasn't perfectly clear. The consultant asked him to explain exactly what he wanted his employer to know, and why he was the best person for the job. What the consultant was explaining to the tutor definitely didn't match up on paper. As we've been told numerous times in class, it's always necessary to have a conversation about the paper/piece of writing before even looking at it, and the client's eyes were already growing wide with realization as they discussed it.

The consultant had a pretty solid knowledge base for cover letter formats. The client had his stuff a little thrown around and not in super-logical order, such as the addresses and the "Enclosed/Attached" part, so the consultant asked where the client thought the employer would look first.

I liked that this session was non-directive. With things such as resumes and cover letters, one can get really carried away rattling off the strict formatting and page limit standards, but the consultant was continuously asking the client what he thought the employer might want or what specific information and details he wanted to convey most. The consultant did spend a bit of time going over cover letter rhetoric — such that it's sometimes the only thing employers will look at, so you have to make it eye-catching — but the consultant wasn't long-winded about it.

I really appreciated the different atmosphere. The session wasn't radically different from what I've done/seen at Bessey/the library, but the people here seemed different, with (obviously) different writing goals in mind. And, naturally, different people comprise a writing center specified for a certain group of students.

Good times!