I understand how our tutees feel tonight as I am trying to write a 2000 word paper. Well, maybe not the 2000 word part. We don't see many of those. I feel that I've written everything I have to say except the conclusion but I am only at 1500. Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can write 500 more words without B.S.-ing. What do you guys do when you can't think of anything else to say?
Maybe there isn't anything else I can do besides come up with more ideas to include. Writing is a lot easier to tutor than to do.
I think that I will stop for awhile and to see if writer's block goes away.

The Third Time is the Charm

This is the third time I have tried to blog this week. If all goes well I’ll be able to get this out before some computer freakazoid thing happens again.

I've been working hard every day of my life this semester, and when I wonder about it I remember this tutoring class is the biggest culprit of all the time-hogging "activities" I have to do. My once a week work shift is always packed full of tutoring opprtunities and projects while my evenings are spent reading and writing and reading writing about writing. My only consolation is that I come in handy despite all my defects. (I don't regret at all being a tutor).

I really enjoy tutoring and feeling like I am really making good use of my time, and others, while I'm in school but some days I just need to take a breather and feel like I am actually learning and not just filling myself up beyond my maximum capacity with information. Not that the tutoring class is too much information but on top of the thirteen other credit hours I have it is a lot for my platter. I don't remember ever feeling this helped, helpful and helpless in my life.

This action-packed semester-o-fun has already been sending me on enough Roller Coaster rides to last me a lifetime. Five weeks into the semester and I have just enough time to get by without an emotional breakdown. Well, I'm not sure I would break down but I certainly have some things I could cry about if I wanted to. I do love my classes and they are all about my favorite things; ceramics, photography, art history, adolescents, oh, and writing, can't forget that. I may be in over my head but that's okay, I'm learning how to swim.

Speaking of swimming, my time at the university has taught me how to swim by trial and error in academic writing. I don't really know how I've learned to write on an academic level. Maybe I haven't learned yet, but when I first started I was told to do things a certain way. I hated to think I should just write what I was told to write when I didn't want to even have an opinion about such things. My refusal to conform to the mold I thought I was supposed to make myself fit into turned out to be what I should do. I was making my own mold by writing what I wanted to say in my own way. I was just told to be better at it after that and that's what I've been working on ever since. But as a former English major, I got sick of writing and sick of feeling like I had to find something to say and say it in writing.

Now that the focus of my classes is no longer on writing, I have something to say and I don't mind saying it. However, it may not make much sense these days due to a small amount of brain power that must be spread over many subjects and focuses. And that's all I have to say about that.

Inventions!

When I think about "inventing" the university", I always think of Wallace and Gromit, or the guy who made Flubber, or Maurice from Beauty and the Beast. All of these people had one thing in common: they were inventors! ya. And Kassie just supplied another person: Emmit Brown from Back to the Future. This is what I am thinking when I remember those first days of college: the stress, the worries over if the teacher is going to put me immediately in front of the class to discuss the analogies of the bug in The Metamorphosis, the fatigue of speaking "smart" language. When I started classes, they were all generals, so nobody was really expecting that from me at that time. It was like high school all over again, except without sleeping so much. Then, since I immediately knew what my major was going to be, that was when the teachers wanted me to be "smarter."
I felt the pressure! I thought I was never going to make it if I have to be a scholar. Unfortunately, this reflected in my papers. I tried to sound as "smart" as possible because I expected it to be easier to get an A. Not smart. Instead of sounding "smarter" I was in fact dumb with my answers, my stupid inflated vocabulary was more inflated, and I didn't think that there was a hint of my thinking in any of my assignments. Isn't it ironic? Pretending to be smart and turning out to be far from it. So this made me think of the inventors we know and love. What do they do to create the things they made? They had education from the knowledge they already had, but they weren't afraid to try their hand at new things. It's all about exploration, exploring the many facets of what people want or need and creating their own solutions. I feel it's the same way with inventing the university. We look at the academic world around us, we absorb some of the knowledge, and we find ourselves in it. Plus, I love Wallace and Gromit.

Oh My Gosh! This has just been the greatest day ever! I slept through my History class-which really isn't that bad- I was just a little bit late for work, then I get this guy who has no idea what plagiarism is, so explaining to him how and what to do with paraphrasing was difficult. But the session dragged on, and I guess-by another’s observation-my tutee had gone away somewhere. I then got so sweetly 'critiqued' on how to know when to stop the tutoring session.
I know we discuss in our meetings and in class how to watch and notice these signs of boredom, but people slip up. In Friday’s session though I tutored another student and I watched her body language, eye contact, everything. She stopped to ask questions more than I did. I posed a question or two, and she answered without hesitation, clearly. Oh! If only other students could be like her. I didn’t fix her grammatical errors, but only showed her where they were. Her essay was, by far, the best I have seen this semester. She had great intro., fabulous thesis, great body proving her thesis, and a great conclusion tying back to her intro and thesis.
Her argument was touchy with cloning but she used her references lovely and didn’t take a soap box stand on it. Brilliant!


I thinkKirsten is also Brilliant! She says exactly what I feel all the time, although I haven't read any of y'alls blogs. Writing about writing is more difficult than thinking about thinking. I think to think about thinking becuase I do get confused and think i'm standing my elbow and looking at everythink with my foot. Maybe by getting confused you might be able to write about something... I don't know. It's all unknown!

I just wanna give a shout to my momma for....stuff and thank Claire for checking up on my paycheck error...dealies. Homer is not as cool as Brian. And what I have to say about that.

Then I feel kinda bad, because Kyle was the only one to notice and mention that something seemed to be bothering me and I told him to just forget about it. I didn't wanna talk about it because I still a little emotional -and what female isn't- and didn't wanna break down. I'd rather come off as a 'bad-word' than to seem like a sissy, even though I am a sissy-girl.

And on completely different note, that should not be taken seriously, I have homework for sale. Anyone can jump in and offer to take it off my hands; I let ya! You don't even have to pay, it's all free. *sigh* anyway, I'm done complaining for now. If any of you guys read this, well, haha.

hypocrisy is a sin and I am learning from it.

This first month of tutoring has been really busy. I guess that is a good thing because it means we have been doing a good job in the past and we are probably getting a lot of referrals. I haven't tutored since fall of 2004, so I was a little nervous for my first couple of sessions. They weren't too bad. I just tried to stick to the basics: thesis, organization, and grammar. As I help more and more students, I become more comfortable and more confident with my skills. I'm glad we have been so busy. It gives me more oppurtunites to practice and get ready for all those ten plus page papers that will start coming in mid-semester.

Balance Stuff!!

Well, for me writing in High School was explained in moris code. I was sure that there must be a way to do it, and I assumed that it was the way the teacher explained that it should be done, but then realized when the students, who to me had written some obscure essay, were praised, that what the teacher said she expected from us, was not really what she expected at all. It wasn't until I spent two years as a missionary teaching people with wide ranges of education about my religion, that I began to understand audience. Upon returning to school, and sitting down to write my first essay for 2010, a task that took many more hours than I thought it would, I realized that my professor, though a very informed and open minded person, was expecting me to pretend that he was well informed on every topic except the one I was writing on. I also decided that when he said clear and concise, what he meant was "even though I am your professor, and I know everything about what you are about to write, you need to explain, define, and give examples, just like you did when teaching the people in Ecuador." So when I wrote my paper on Miles Davis, even though I knew the professor knew who Miles Davis was, and that I knew that he had probably listened to more of Davis's music than I had, I still had to explain that Davis was a trumpet player that helped to introduce Jazz Fusion. And that Jazz Fusion was a mix between the jazz of that time period, and the rock n' roll of that time.

Also, because I still have more time to write, I learned that my professor wanted me to be bold and confident. He didn't want me write a thesis like, "Because I am a stupid college kid who still enjoys watching Full House and has just barely begun studying Miles Davis, I think that Miles Davis is probably the almost greatest trumpet player to ever live in the 1990's." He wanted me to pretend I was smart, almost arrogant. He wanted a thesis like, "Miles Davis, a trumpet player from the seventies and eighties, is the best trumpet player to ever live." And then of course, he wanted me to prove it with other bold statements like, "Louis Armstrong was good, but all he could do was blow really hard into his trumpet." And, "Dizzie Gillespie, though a prominent trumpet player, could not hit the high notes like Miles Davis could."

So, for me, I decided that I would write like I knew it all, and do it clearly, as though I were talking to someone intelligent, but uninformed on the topic I was writing about. As a general rule, I think this works in almost all cases.

Good Paper

For my journal entry, I would like to talk about a recent experience I had while tutoring.

A girl came in tonight looking for help on a paper she had just revised. (She got help from an amazing tutor yesterday. I don't know who he was, but he did an awesome job.) She read the assignment objectives to me and proceeded to read her essay. I thought it was awesome, but she obviously was stressing out and thought it needed some more help. I felt obligated to find something she could fix, but really I couldn't. So, for ten minutes or so I asked her questions hoping she would find something wrong, but she didn't. In the end I made two little suggestions. They might make the paper a little longer, but I don't think they will necessarily make it better. So what do we do when the paper is at the point where we can't think of anything that will make it better. Like I said, I feel like we are obligated to do or teach something that will make the writer better, but if we can't, can we just say 'Good paper. Please come again?"

?

Is the question "How did I figure out what teachers wanted?"? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be writing about since I am not in the 3840 class.

Firemen Burning Books

I focused on the "commonplace" in my response to Bartholomae's "Inventing the University," and I want to address two related ideas. My struggle with approximating the "discourse" was and continues to be essentially the same problem every student faces: I developed a series of key phrases and escape-words that moved my writing along when I was floundering. The result was often a useless and lazy production that meant nothing to me, just as the idioms meant nothing to me. I soon stumbled upon an essay, program or maybe movie (I've obviously forgotten the source) that discussed owning our words, and everything changed. I realized the depth of my ignorance and quickly reevaluated my writing. I was sick of a vocabulary replete with nonsense and a language over which I had no control. We own our language and we choose our words, therefore my "discourse" was a reflection of either my perception of the world or my complacency. I still slip into the "commonplace", but for the most part I now either own my words or admit my ignorance.
Now to Ray Bradbury. When Montag meets Faber in Fahrenheit 451 they discuss something important. Faber mentions how so many people waste their lives in ignorance to appear knowledgeable, and how pushing out our ignorance (e.g. admitting we don't know the meaning of a certain word rather than nodding our heads in agreement) is always the better alternative -- because we learn. The idea affected me profoundly, and I think there is a general fear in students that we might appear stupid if we don't grasp a concept or definition, which makes us hide our ignorance and write essays full of bloated diction and awkward sentences.
So the next time I seriously use the word "phantasmagoria," you can assume I looked it up before you punch me in the face.

I'll be the First

I'll confess: I'm a teacher pleaser. I worry about what teachers think of me, worry about ways of reaching them that will improve their opinion of me, and I worry far too much about sounding like the sort of student they want me to be.

So when I say that I discovered the teachers' discourse probably in preschool please believe me. I had a very powerful preschool teacher. I guess, to be entirely accurate it was a prekindergarten class at a private school, which my father was teaching English in. You know the private school's snobbish ways. Well, we were taught how to read and write at that early age, but we were also taught how to draw.

We were filling in the lines of a farm scene: barns, silos, cows, the like. I had started drawing one direction, up and down on a particular silo when I had an epiphany: silos aren't flat, they're round. To this day I remember that moment as a day in which a n new world opened up to me. Of course we know the world as children and have confidence that the way we view things is the way they actually are, but at that moment I saw that confidence shift. I started shading in that silo left to right. It was liberating! The world is not held within one dimention or not even within two. But then my teacher wandered over to my seat.

" What are you doing, Chris?"

What should one say to such an obvious question? I thought for a moment and replied, "I'm drawing."

"I see that. What are you drawing?"

"A silo."

"I see." At this point she walked to the next desk, picked up my neighbors completed, now lifeless depiction of the farm scene, and plopped it down covering mine. "How is yours different that Carly's?"

At this point I began to sense that something I had done was amiss, and though I wracked my mind with ever possible dilema I never considered that that discovering a new view of the world that opened my eyes to a host of new realities could ever be anything but glorious.

"Chris, you're a smart kid. Certainly you've realized that Carly's is neat and orderly. You've seen that hers using only one directional strokes."

I was still confused; not so much because of the language, though words like directional and stroke did befuddle me for a few seconds. I just couldn't believe that my discovery, my revolution of thought, the thing that I wanted, now, to shout out to the whole class that they might know of the freedom I had just now discovered, could ever possibly be wrong. But then my teacher did something that had, if possible larger rammifications than even my previous discover had.

"Chris, I want you to do it again, except this time, draw all the picture the same direction."

To me, this was crushing. Of course I couldn't tell the teacher that. And though now, I don't remember her name, and her figure is very hazy in my visual memory as well, I can't forget that deflation. So, now, almost twenty years later, I'm still struggling with the fierce desire to please my educational advisors: I'm still seeking words to say and write--and draw-- to make teachers see me as somehow better. However, I would have to say that today I'm a bit better off than I was when I was four. If a teacher tried to tell me to draw only one direction. I'd embrace her, and say exultantly, "Come and see what I've discovered!"

Inventing the University

I'd like to see you all continue our discussion from Tuesday about Ong and Bartholomae. Specifically, I'm interested in seeing you all write about your own experiences with learning the "discourse" of the university. How did you figure it out? What kinds of problems did you have along the way?

Run-on question of fixing papers

I have been thinking a little bit about Melissa's response and Tyler's "challenging questions." It is difficult to tell the student what is wrong without fixing it for them. Not only that, how do I explain why something may be wrong or confusing or--- whatever?

Today I tutored a student that had a ton of run-on sentences in her paper. At first I didn't know what was going on with all of the super long sentences, but after I felt winded from reading them and realizing that some of them (if not all) were dragging on without an end, I knew what was the problem. She didn't know how to end her thoughts. Even though I diagnosed what the problem was, I still had the question of how to explain what is going on without just fixing them for her. I didn't know where else to begin except by saying, "I think that I am seeing run-ons. Do you know what a run-on is?" She kind of did, but asked me to remind her what they were. So I did. Then, by explain what they are and then teaching some ways to fix them, (put a conjunction, end the sentence and begin another, or use a semi-colon---- and I explained what a semi-colon is---) we were able to return to her paper with a little more understanding of what was going on and maybe how to fix it. After we had discussed run-ons, we returned to the paper. The next sentence we read was a run-on. I stopped reading and explained: "Here is a run-on, like I was telling you about." And then I gave options on how to fix it. She chose the one that she liked and we moved on. Soon, she was the one to point out the run-ons. And then she was giving me the options of how to fix it; I tried very hard, though, to not tell her which ways were better. It is her paper after all. I did not want to take-over and cross the line. It was hard sometimes because I could see her struggling, but when she chose the way that she thought fit best and asked my opinion, I gave it to her. “I ended this sentence here. Is that right?” she would ask me. I would answer, “it works, in fact, I really like it…”

I guess it is possible to explain how to fix something without doing it for them. It was hard, but it worked I guess. So--You look for the student’s reaction to see if you are crossing the line? Right? She was engaged the entire time, so I guess that was a good thing. I even cracked a joke during one of the tense moments of the session, just to get relaxed again, and she quickly dismissed it with a half smirk and then continued to work. I don’t know what that means… was it bad of me to comment on not having seen “The Others” the movie while working on a sentence that talked about “others”?

Some Challenging Questions

Melissa raised an interesting issue in her response. She said, “Sometimes I’m not sure how to tell the student there is an error without telling them how to correct it.” I’ve had trouble with this also.

In class we spoke about waiting the student out—the dreaded awkward silence. But is there another way—an alternative? What if the student just needs to begin the sentence with the word ‘after’ or ‘because’ to have a really great sentence, but despite their efforts, they just can’t think of it? Do we suggest a particular word or phrase to get the ball rolling? Or do we wait them out? If we suggest the “right” word, we know they will probably use it. But in that case, are we taking-over the paper?

How can we lead a student in a better direction without simply spelling it out for them? If we show them a few good alternatives will they learn how to do it on there own, or just learn how to take answers from a tutor? I don’t really know the answers, but maybe it goes back to the questions Molly Wingate asked in the text: Did the student learn anything during the session? And who did the work? Before an answer can even begin to be formulated, we have to consider that each session is different, each student an individual, every paper has its own challenges, and the answers aren’t always the same. So where do we go from here?

Leap over the line or straddle it?

It's a common experience by now: I sit down with a student expecting only the greatest experience and after the logistics of taking down his name and birthday I pose a very simple question. "So what are you working on?"

From his response I can generally tell how the rest of the session will go, independent of myself. I find myself most often expecting too much out of the students I work with. I mean by that, that either I push the student too far--seeking for more than the student was prepared for--or I find myself using language the student doesn't seem to be familiar with.

This is especially evident if I'm working with a student for whom English is not his/her first language. At times it's difficult for me to use other words. I think, in general I notice when the student is not with me, or other words of when I've "crossed the line" but I don't always know what to do differently.

For example last week I worked with a student who handed me a paper with absolutely no sense of punctuation, spelling, organization, or, in general, any sense of the language. I did recognize certain words from which I was able to, in some instances, gather a general idea of where he wanted to go. But that was it. What I do? I think I told him that I thought that he had some good ideas (the only piece of positive feedback I could think of). I then showed him, trying to involve him as much as possible by asking questions like" "It looks like you have two ideas here. Can you think of any way of combining those so they form a sentence?" But that wasn't clear enough for him.

I wanted to help him; I really did, but is there a point at which are help become counter-productive? I worked through two sentences with him which took half an hour. I showed him how to present his paper the way his professor probably would like it to be presented: with sentences and clear paragraphs, and told him to come back if he has any further trouble.

It's those types of interactions that trouble me. What should I do when the student takes little to know responsibility for his paper and is just relying solely on my limited knowledge of sentence structure to "fix" his paper? I guess the thing for me to do is to be more assertive in explaining what we are really hear for: to help writers become better writers. We're not expected to be miracle workers are we?

Crossing the line. SNOGBLOPG

I’ve had a few times where I’ve crossed the line in a tutoring session. Mostly it happens when a student isn’t as engaged as I’d like them to be, the session becomes awkward, and I become uncomfortable. I feel like they just want me to tell them what to do, and sometimes I find myself going along with it just so I can get the session over with. Other times, I get mad at what’s happened and I just ask the student more questions in hopes that they will realize that I’m not there to tell them what to do and that they need to tell me their ideas no matter what those ideas are.

I can usually tell I’ve crossed the line when I start telling the student how they could word something they wanted to add but couldn’t think of a way to say it. If the student isn’t generating ideas on their own or they don’t feel confident to share what their coming up with, they usually want to take my idea of what to say and use it in their paper. I also tend to take over after we’ve talked about the larger issues of the paper and begin to focus on major punctuation errors. Sometimes I’m not sure how to tell the student there is an error in the paper without telling them how to correct it. I’ve used questioning techniques to try to lead the student to realize what type of mistake it is, but this doesn’t always work. I’m still figuring out how to handle this.

It didn’t take me very long to develop the sense of when I was crossing the line in a tutoring session when it came to taking over. I knew as soon as I started talking and writing more than the student, the line had been crossed. However, I’m still having trouble recognizing when I’m overwhelming the student. When they ask a question I know a lot about, I tend to tell them absolutely everything, and it’s only when I’m done talking that I realize they may not have wanted to hear all of what I said. This actually happened today. A student came in with a question of how to cite an internet source in MLA format. This subject is not even very exciting to me, but I found myself going on and on about it. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped and asked if what I was saying was helpful. I don’t think this is the ideal situation, and I want to be better at gauging how much information the student really wants. I think some of the questions from our text book will be helpful, like asking if this is what they want to focus on or finding out if the things I’m talking about are what they had in mind for their paper. Hopefully by doing this, I’ll eventually be better able to evaluate the needs of the student.

Crossing the line and ESL students

As a new tutor it can be really difficult to know where the line is and when we’ve crossed it. Right now, maybe the most important thing I know about the line is that there is one. At least I can be aware that there is a point that I’m not supposed to cross with the student. Sometimes the tutor can perceive that a line has been crossed, but other times—especially for new tutors—it is helpful to be reminded of the line.

One of the most useful signs of crossing the line, as Wingate points out, is the body language of the student being tutored. Is the student active and engaged in the session? Does he have a pencil in hand, ready to write? Is she staring off into space, oblivious to the session? Whether in the writing center or in another social setting, I think we can all usually tell when someone is not interested in what we have to say. We catch on pretty quick when a person would rather be somewhere else, talking to someone else, doing something else. When we get that same awkward feeling in the writer center we know that something has gone wrong. The trickiest part of the situation—after we know there’s a problem—is to find a feasible, quick solution to get the session back on course. Maybe I’ll know more about this when I have a little more experience—for now, I’m not really sure.

Last week in the writing center I helped a few ESL students. I think, as Claire mentioned, that the line for an ESL student is different than for a native speaking student. One ESL student I helped had a short one-page paper for his Communications class. It was a good paper. I liked the order and the ideas he used, but he had also misused a lot of conjunctions, used the wrong tense for his verbs, and used the word to way too much. I wasn’t exactly sure how much to correct and how much to let go. Through the first half of the paper I didn’t say much about grammar and misused words, but once I realized how significant the problem was, I started to help him. We also went back and looked over the first half of the page a second time to catch the errors we had skipped over the first time.

I’m not really sure where the line was in that session or if I crossed it. I tried to do what I thought was most helpful to the student during the session, but I made quite a few marks on his page—maybe too many. So, where is the line for ESL students?

I can remember learning a new language and feeling completely confused and lost. I always hoped, and even asked, for people to correct me when I said something wrong, mispronounced a word, misused a phrase, or conjugated a verb incorrectly. That was the best way to learn. We learn from our mistakes, but only when we CORRECT them. For the most part, however, people would NOT correct me. They were too nice, too polite, too passive. A little basic help from a native speaker can make a world of difference for a non-native speaker.

A Monday Blog

I am probably the least experienced of the new tutors and so I usually answer these questions with a broad "maybe-they-won't-realize-who-I-am" grin. But when it comes to awkward silence, and knowing how to create it, I think I'm a near-expert. For that reason, I think it's something naturally human to perceive when another is uncomfortable (they're usually sitting rather close to us and that of course can intensify the experience). I agree that the instant we start feeling that something is wrong we can generally assume that a line has been crossed. But I don't think it's that much of a tragedy if something can be done about it. It's very plain to see why training is necessary to become a tutor, but it just isn't possible to exemplify and use every suggestion and training received in one session. It would really be ridiculous -- I think my head would explode. And so I realized that eventually (or perhaps not even then), when our experience matches our level of training, we can develop a style that incorporates much of what is expected but some of what is entirely natural and untouched. That's why crossing the line is important but not essential -- we can do it in a thousand ways. It's returning that's significant.
That's what I want to learn.

Practice and Experience, I guess

I think that in Wingate's article, she says that it comes with experience to not only know when you have crossed the line but also how to fix it and "move on" (13). Along with this, I have learned through my minute experience, how tutoring should, maybe, feel like. The best sessions for me is when the writer is interested in what they have written, willing to revise and do most of the talking. The silence, as Dr. Rogers has warned, sometimes is unbearable, and it helps to hear what the writer is thinking. I like it when those that I tutor explain what they were thinking (or trying to say) when they wrote a particular sentence or something--- they talk about what the assignment is suppose to be, what they think the professor wants them to write about, why they think the assignment could be meaningful, etc. In other words, I like to hear what their thinking process is so I can see a little more where they are coming from and maybe a little of the "why" they wrote the way they did or something. And then, hopefully I can help them convey that thinking more clearly in their writing.

I also like it when writers fix their own mistakes. It shows that they are understanding what I might have been trying to explain to them or (more often) it shows that the writer is really engaged in the session, and by reading it, they revise their own writing, which I think is fantastic. Self-revising is the way to go because it shows not only me that they can do it, but also to themselves. They are always welcome in the Writing Center to write, but by revising something for themselves, maybe the student can realize that the skill of writing can be taken wherever--- thus fulfilling our statement, processing writers as well as writing.


Tutors need to be good listeners, too. If I am a good listener and take the time to realize what the student’s needs are and explain only the concepts that apply to the student’s needs, then hopefully I will give them what they need and not just random stuff that they probably won’t remember when they leave anyway. It takes experience to realize when you are crossing the line. But not only that, tutors learn what a good tutoring sessions feels like. When the session does not feel like it is going as well as I think it should, or as good as favorite sessions have felt, where I feel like they have been fulfilling for the writer, (and sometimes they say that) then it must mean that I have “crossed the line” somewhere and I need to adjust to a change in my way of tutoring. I think that is what Wingate was talking about when she said that when tutors think that they have crossed the line then they probably have (12). I guess I need to trust my intuition when I feel like I might be doing something wrong because I know what a good session feels like, and this is not it--- so it needs to change.