Be Sneaky

The problem of apathy at the university is one that at first perplexed me, but then later encouraged me. Let me explain. There is a phrase that we often hear around campus when something goes wrong like, "Well, what do you expect? This is Weber State." I hear it very often as a janitor here on campus. At first I hated the thought that people would actually go through the trouble of registering, paying, getting financial aid, and then parking on campus to do something that they really don't want to do haunted me. Why would you do something like that? The part of this that bothered me was that I wanted a education that was competetive with the rest of the schools in the state and country and I didn't feel like apathetic students were going to help that any. However, realizing that Weber accepts just about everybody, motivated or not, I decided to take advantage of the opportunities available here that no one else was taking. Weber State, whether you believe it or not, is actually quite competetive with other schools in the sense that it offers tons of opportunities to its students. In the English Department alone there are so many things to do that you can easily fill your semester to overfull. So, I guess my point is to encourage everyone to get involved in all of the things that Weber offers. It's easy because no one else does.

Now, I have realized that no matter which school you go to there are going to be apathetic students. And while most of the students that come to the Writing Center actually want to be there and want to learn, occasionally we do receive the "student who doesn't care." My theory regarding these students is to figure out how much they are willing to participate in the session, and then relate writing to whatever it is they like to do. For example, if a student comes in and is obviously not interested in writing I may ask them if they have a job, play a sport, have a family or whatever, and then link their writing to that. Usually people like to talk about things they love. They also understand those things very thoroughly. So, link writing to what they love and suddenly they can tolerate it enough to give some kind of effort to the session and then to the paper.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing other people's ideas regarding this because every student generally demands a unique approach.