I've now learned that I know nothing

The semester is over in two weeks pretty much, which among many other things (struggling to complete my bibliographic essay for example. I'll be talking to you, Dr. Rogers), means that next semserter we'll be much more left to our own acquired knowledge to continue our tutoring. I suppose the biggest thing I have learned this semester is that, though I started this semester feeling pretty confident in my writing and tutoring skills, I have now decided that I know close to nothing of any real consequence. Certainly, I knew much less to begin the semester.

Having said that, however, I must say that I'm discovering some important things that I think will prove very valuable in my future as a tutor. One thing I've learned is that when a tutor and writer can work together on a paper it provides a much better environment for learning. I've had some sessions in which, try as I might, the student simply wouldn't be an active participant in the process. The student continued to question his/her abilities, took my advice far too literally and too easily, and waited for me to suggest where we should proceed rather than taking the helm himself/ herself. Beyond it being so much more effective when writers will work with their tutors, it also makes things so much more enjoyable for both parties involved.

I've also realized the importance of grammar. All my life I've been taught that a noun is a person place or thing but I've never understood why that matters. And I suppose I'm still not perfectly clear on that point, but at least I understand--through our great discussions on the controversies of grammar flunctuations--that grammar is important so everyone can understand each other. I guess one of the biggest dangers of the growing popularity of text messaging and other types of short hand writing is that it leaves many people out of the loop. It seems to me that language is at least as important for cultural identification as a nations flag, native foods, and local customs, but yet I can see a division that is growing ever wider. At least now I won't be taken by total surprize when people start printing on our currency 'N Gd We Trst!

And I suppose my favoritre thing I've discovered through this tutoring experience, is the real joy I've felt when I've helped students realize that they really are good writers. There is so much in society to remind people of what they are not--idolizing Hollywood stars, basketball players for role models, etc.--;it's so nice to be able to tell people what they are doing well.

Coupled with this positive thought is the discovery of all of you. I definitely second what so many of you have commented on in your own blogs of reflection: it has been so nice to have so much support from all the writing tutors, Claire, and Dr. Rogers. When I started this semester, and especially when starting this tutoring thing, I was so afraid of being grossly underqualified. I've realized that qualifications are great, but more important than these is a open mind and an arsenal of brilliant tutors at my back. I so appreciate all the help you've given me, though my personal skill might have been limited.

My hope is--not to be overly sentimental or anything--that we will still support each other in the wonderful way that we have thus far, despite this class ending. I guess that would be my advice for future generations of tutors: enjoy the learning process, and when the time comes to prove their merit by leaving the English 3840 class they will maintain a close relationship with all the tutors. It has certainly been valuable for me.

Gnivigsknaht

I know this may be pushing the limits of the use of this blog, but I'm full of holiday thoughts that I must relieve myself of.

There is a reason we love our families. I don't believe it is merely from growing up together or sharing the same blood (although I think the blood idea has a good arguement). We must love each other for survival. Holiday traditions are designed to allow families to develop survival tactics to use "against" the rest of the world, or everybody else. Not that it is always "us" against "them" but it is when we feel threatened enough to defend our famly name.

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays. The tradition, although not the same for everyone, is generally spent with those we sometimes haven't seen since last Thanksgiving, for several years, or yesterday. And I for one am glad to have spent enough time away from my family that it's really nice to get together. I couldn't be around them for very long but a holiday and a few other days will maintain the ralationships and keep me in check with myself and my needs. Isn't that funny that absence really does make the heart grow fonder? But it causes us to forget things that only reveal themselves after several hours, and to obtain some things that were missing untill we surround ourselves with relatives (but they have to be our own).

Advice

I should have assumed tutoring would be rather complex-- or at least something that would require training. Even as I registered for the class, I still felt like it would be something more natural than learned. And then I read the essays dedicated to the situations tutors encounter, and I listened to the way Claire spoke about the writing center, and my ideas began to focus. I really started to enjoy the camaraderie of the class and the way it felt to help someone grasp the possibility of expression in writing. I still feel like we knew most of the techniques we reviewed in class before we became tutors: it's just that we learned directly how a certain word or phrasing can change someone's attitude dramatically; how a quiet gesture or a spoken compliment can open doors previously sealed.
It's important to remember that not every suggestion or technique can or should be employed in a particular setting. It's like the contents of a drawer have been dumped on a wide table: we choose the pieces to organize and call our own. Some other ideas floating in the pensieve include never assuming the depth of someone's intelligence from his or her writing; the importance of conversation in establishing the tone of a session; and that global issues take precedence over local issues.
I haven't met the ultimate tutor. I don't suppose I ever will. Everyone -- professors, tutors, doctors, scholars -- keeps a back room with a table of acquired paperclips, rubber-bands, stamps, and (sometimes) knowledge. The fools are those who keep the door locked.

I still love fluffy!

From reading the poetry submissions from the Writing Contest, I, like Katie, was looking for the Great American Poetry of the 21st Century but instead I received anything but great. Some of the poems were cliches, bad metaphors, even one where I wanted to kick the person for using repetition. Urgh, repetition, it can only be used if you are intending to make a statement. Not filling the page. I read a few poems, however, that really came through as strong ones. There was one about a ship sailing in turbulent seas, and they were sailing through arctic storms, and I really felt like that poem was taking me somewhere. Another one, about a graveyard, was very harsh and concrete about its imagery, but it made sense to me. The writer wasn't morbid, he was making a point, and did it well. Sometimes poets make such a big deal that they think that they're writing good poetry, that it comes out as a forced attempt at brilliance. Even though I feel for them, they need to realize that sometimes poetry does not have to sound brilliant in order to be brilliant. Insipid!

I believe that great writers create literature, not because they know the ins and outs of metaphor and great allusion and good cacophony, but they just want to draw the reader in to their world. They want to reach out and grab somebody and bring them into the conversation. Yes, it does take a heightened knowledge to write something great, but there's the passion, the need to write, that matters most of all. I don't think the stuff I write is worthy of publishment, but I still know the passion and need to write that makes it worthwhile. Yes, in our class, we talked about writing being a royal pain, but it's a pain I want to endure. It's the conversation I want to share with others.

I think that I've become a better tutor because we have talked about empathizing with those beginning writers. I know now how to understand the fact that some people who come into the Writing Center need to learn about commas and grammar, and we can listen patiently and teach them the way how to work through it. That's a very valuable thing for me to discover, that I can help (could this be?) people bring a mountain down to an anthill. That's what tutoring should be about.

Choices and Order

In my sessions with students, order has consistently been one of the most challenging issues to address. Sometimes, a paper just doesn’t seem to go anywhere—it may have good sentences and interesting ideas, but fails to make a point or a solid statement. Other times, a paper may have a good thesis and even a good conclusion, but the rest of the paper just doesn’t successfully connect the two. And other times, a paper just feels wrong—although I may not know why it is wrong or how to fix it, I can tell there is a problem.

Maybe it is so difficult to talk to student writers about order because I don’t know the most correct and most effective order for every paper—I usually don’t even know it for my own papers. It many cases, like Chris mentioned, order is arbitrary—it changes and evolves over time and from place to place. It isn’t a fixed formula, but a choice made by a writer. Sometimes, it can be the most important choice of a piece of writing, but sometimes it can only get in the way.

During the summer months, I like to go to Causey Dam to cliff jump, kayak, and hike. From my house, I can take Highway 84 up Weber Canyon, or drive across town to 12th street and go up Ogden Canyon. Both routes get me to the same place near Pineview Dam where I can continue up Monte Cristo to Causey—the path is different, but the destination is the same. With some papers—although there may be more than two paths to choose from—the destination is the most important element. As long as the writer leads the reader to the right place, she has been successful.

But suppose that on my way to Causey I wanted to show my friend the entrance to the Snowbasin ski resort. If we drive up Ogden Canyon, we could easily get to Snowbasin, but we might have to backtrack to get back on the road to Causey. On the other hand, if we chose Weber Canyon, we would also have to cross Trapper’s Loop and we would pass the entrance to Snowbasin on the way without losing any time or retracing our path. In this scenario, the destination is the same, but the road that we chose is not merely arbitrary, but an important part of our agenda.

Just as the choice to take Weber or Ogden Canyon on my way to Causey may or may not be important on a given day, the order of a specific paper may be more or less important in different circumstances. If the writer has led the reader to the right place and past the desired landmarks, he has done a good job. But what if my friend wanted to take I-15, or Riverdale Road to get to Causey Dam? No matter how pleasant the ride, we would never reach our destination—we would be lost and frustrated. Some students are on the right road—they just need to define clearly their starting point, where they want to end up, and what they want to cover on the way. Other students—although not that many in my experience so far—don’t even seem to be on the right road. They are the hard ones to handle; they need serious directions to get back on course.

As we have discussed, writing has a lot to do with choice. When a writer chooses one path, he often has to eliminate many others—I can’t take both canyons up to Causey, I have to choose just one. In the Writing Center, we can’t make all the decisions for the students, but we can help them see the destination and allow them to choose a path that will get them there.

Contests, Hornby, and Sunflowers and Fuzzy Bunnies

I am guilty of doing something Murray warned against: I'm afraid I started out reading the fiction entries for the writing contest expecting to find the Great American Novel. It hasn't happened yet. I haven't even found the Great American Short Story. One of my silly preconceived notions about judging the writing contest was the idea that all of the truly brilliant prose would knock me out of my chair.

Nick Hornby (the author of About a Boy) writes a column for the Believer magazine called "Stuff I've Been Reading" in which he lists the books he bought in the course of the month and the books he read in the course of the month. (The two lists rarely ever match and there are many books he has not yet gotten around to reading. This is vastly reassuring to me.) His monthly column, then, is essentially a review of the books he's read. I just finished reading The Polysyllabic Spree -- a collection of fourteen months worth of columns. And if I have learned nothing else from reading these essays, I have learned this: good reading material shows up in some of the places where you least expect to find it. The trick is to stop having such incredibly high expectations. This man appreciates memoirs about autism because they ring true as much he appreciates the style of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield.

I suppose my point is this: this man has become one of my favorite people who write about books because he approaches the novels he reads with few (and often false) expectations about what he is going to read. Once I stopped expecting the extraordinary, the writing in front of me seemed to improve by degrees. Much of the fiction still seems sooooo violent, but I suppose someday I will have to reconcile myself to the idea that the world is not full of sunflowers and fuzzy bunnies.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am developing the ability to forget about my far-reaching expectations. But please don't make me leave the sunflowers and fuzzy bunnies behind just yet.

Reflection(s)

Now that we're nearing the end of the semester, I'd like to see you all reflect a little on what you've learned thus far about tutoring. How has your thinking about tutoring changed, if at all? What have you learned? What did you not expect? Most importantly, what kind of advice would you pass on to future tutors?

the last last one

Literature is a sloppy art. There is no equation that a person can learn in order to become a good writer. There is no way for a person to read the works of great writers and, by following their examples, write great literature. There is no way for a person to endlessly study the mechanics of metaphor, allusion, character development and playful language, and having learned these strategies by rote, invent unique phrases and apply them to personal composition. While having a knowledge of these skills can help a writer on the technical side of writing, without the innate skills of creativity, inspiration and natural born talent, the writer is left with technically perfect yet soulless art. This creates a problem for those given the job of determining what is “good writing” or “bad writing;” it is impossible to invent specific guidelines for what constitutes quality literature and then try to apply them to an abstractly created medium.

At some point in the judging experience the reader has to set aside the preformed rules and ask himself how the piece made him feel or what it made him think about, and then grade the writing holistically. If an essay is one incredibly long, but poignantly portrayed run on sentence, then it is good writing. If a piece of nonfiction is riddled with clichéd phrases and words, but makes the reader laugh, then it is good writing. Even if the writing is convoluted but contains beautiful imagery and diction, then it is still good writing. Rules can only get a person so far. They are helpful to a point but, sometimes they need to be ditched. Good literature can often be badly written according to the rules we create.

Serving as a judge for the writing contest has been a challenge. First I was asked to come up with grading criteria and then expected to adhere to them while picking the contest winners. This worked for awhile, but after reading a few submissions I had to change my approach to the process. There were a few clearly written, uninteresting pieces, but also a few unclear and awkwardly written pieces that were great. Some of the submissions had an original perspective and were written in an easy to read style, while others’ styles weren’t completely new, but still were interesting to read. In judging each of these submissions it became clear to me that the rules weren’t working in determining what good writing is and that if I wanted to get anywhere I had better loosen the parameters and grade each piece by not only by the rules, but also on their abstract qualities.

At this point I had to ask myself how the literature made me react emotionally and how it related to me as a reader. I also had to step away from judging for awhile in order to see what stories stayed in my mind and which disappeared because of their lack of interesting writing. After all this I combined this amalgam of personal and technical reactions to make my decision.

I don’t know if what I did was right, or even professional, but it seemed like the only thing that could work. Writing is not something that can be graded concretely. It is subjective for both reader and author and its quality cannot be quantified. Literature is not something that can be graded quantitatively. It is as abstract as it is hard to judge. It is as hard to understand is it as to write, and finally it is something that cannot be judged with simple criteria.