Repressed Memories?

The other day in one of my literature classes, our professor was discussing the Ciceronian method for constructing an effective essay—which, believe me, will trump the canonized five paragraphs any day. A master of Ciceronian rhetoric at a young age, Sidney, she said, wrote his “Apology for Poetry” as a mere teenager.

I barely knew my alphabet as a teenager.

That literature class was a humbling reminder that, although I’ve been studying English for a couple decades now, my command of the language is still lacking. My essay writing is no exception. Over the years, however, I did have some phenomenal teachers who helped me learn to write (mostly) coherently.

The first was a middle school teacher whose class was a daily inquisition. Every day for two years, she would make us read from our thick, hardbound “orange Bibles,” quizzing us mercilessly on clauses, phrases, punctuation, gerunds, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and obscure principles from the nethermost verses of grammatical scripture.

Looking back, those two years were boiled asparagus: Nauseating. But nonetheless good for me.
Actually, that tried-in-the-furnace foundation, literarily speaking, was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Since middle school, I’ve never suffered a serious grammar crisis.

Writing is more than grammar, however, and I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for Mrs. Alir’s (not her real name) class in high school. On the first day of class, Mrs. Alir mentioned that her favorite word in the English language was “ephemeral.” I wondered at first if she was trying to intimidate us. After all, she was an English teacher, not a guidance counselor. She wasn’t paid to care about our self esteem. But she did care about our writing.

Writing was Mrs. Alir’s passion. She wrote well, and she wanted her students to write well, and she was notorious for making corrections as copious as the essay itself. A typical paper, when returned, usually had something like this written on the first page:

72 C-
1:20

“Uh, Mrs. Alir, I understand this first line loud and clear, but what does the 1:20 stand for?”

“That’s how much time I spent grading your essay. One hour twenty minutes.”

After so many years of teaching, she found that red—the color of apples, stop signs, and Denmark—had a menacing effect on students, so she had switched to green. Given the psychological phenomenon of free association, that green, believe me, can be just as menacing as any red.

Many parents were never overly fond of Mrs. Alir. After all, their children had received A-triple-pluses in middle school English, so why should they struggle in high school?

A quick glance over their children’s green-slaughtered essays tended to answer most of their questions.

Mrs. Alir was also honest in her feedback. I remember one of he last pieces I ever wrote in high school—I had Mrs. Alir for three out of my four high school years—was handed back to me without a grade.

“To be honest, Michael, I don’t like it.”

“You don’t? Why? My analysis of a Jungian teleological cosmos is ingenious!”

“Your ideas aren’t properly supported. You can try to salvage it if you’d like, but if I were you, I’d scrap the essay and take a different direction.”

I scrapped the essay. I started over. I scored well on the revision.

That experience was another defining moment my essay writing. Rather than trying to bucket water out of an iceberged Titanic, it’s far better, I learned, to swallow my pride, hop in a lifeboat and start over. I’m no Phillip Sidney, but I can recognize a sinking ship when I see one.

At least in my own writing.

The History of Katy: By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant author...

Fun! I am so excited about this one! Probably because I truly enjoy talking about myself in any form and I love talking English. BONUS!

There wasn’t only one teacher or one experience that helped me with writing an essay. It took many teachers, many classes and many experiences for me to finally grasp the essay process. The bulk of it came in high school. If one were to pay attention to different academic news around the nation (who doesn’t, right?), one would hear about a sort of educational turn around in Washington state. Numerous exams have been instated that all students must take and pass in order to graduate. One such exam is called the “Exit Exam”. This is actually two essays that freshmen and sophomores have to take. The first essay, taken freshmen year, is a 5-paragraph persuasive essay. The second is taken Sophomore year and it’s another 5-paragraph essay on how to do anything. Because of this, all English teacher’s were insane on correct essay form and how to be persuasive and make a coherent essays. Not only was I dealing with this, but I was on the yearbook staff as editor of the Student Life, Freshmen, Sophomore and Junior section. My advisor was strict. I had more paper’s ripped up in front of my eyes Sophomore year than every other year combined. That’s how I learned to write a 5 paragraph essay.

However, knowing how a 5 paragraph essay is structured differs from writing a good essay. Out of high school, I knew how to structure an essay with one hand tied behind my back. I was ready to take on the world, much like Dr. Rogers! I’d won an award at a national competition, I’d received A’s in English my entire life and I was sure I’d become a Pulitzer Prized Author by the end of my college education. I had Dr. Loughton for English1010. I strutted into class, thinking that beginning English was such a waste of my time. Dr. Loughton walked into class 10 minutes late and immediately said “I want an essay”. BONUS! I can write essays in no time at all. I was like the kid in “A Christmas Story” who envisioned writing such a well-written persuasive essay that the teacher would give me an A+++++ and I’d never have to write another essay again. He continued, “About a life-changing experience. I don’t care about format. I don’t care about the number of paragraphs. I want you to have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.” I listened to the rest of class in half interest. What’s the big problem? I can do it. I went home and wrote what I thought was a brilliant essay. However, I was wrong. Oh yes, it was well-structured and I had transitions that my high school teachers would have swooned over, but my content was terrible. I was handed my paper back with a big “C-“ emblazoned on the top. I labeled myself a failure. I listened carefully in class on how he wanted feeling in the papers, I took notes on how to choose a better topic and the next class I received a B. I continually worked till I was finally receiving A’s on my papers again.

So that’s basically how it happened. It wasn’t easy. I remember one point where I was at my grandparent’s for dinner and I announced that I would never be a good author and I was giving up. But I eventually did it with LOTS of encouragement from both my mom and sister who are also writers. THANK GOODNESS!

Writing Essays

I suppose I learned how to write an essay primarily from my English 1010 class here up at Weber. I considered myself a pretty good writer, though looking at my old work now, I had an inflated opinion of myself (as all teenagers are prone to do). But I believe I learned how to write pretty well before coming to Weber, and so English 1010 just gave me the specifics that I needed. With only a vague understanding of how to write an essay, I refined it through practice and eventually got better at it, good enough to get good grades. I never actually got any bad marks for any of my papers here at Weber, certainly nothing lower than a B+. I guess it becomes a debate of whether I already knew what to do, or whether I learned it through osmosis, or excellent teaching, but I don’t know for sure.

Well, thinking about it just now, I think that I learned how to write all by myself...mostly. In the summertime of youthful fancies (i.e. 12) I fancied myself a writer after reading the Thomas Covenant series, by Stephen R. Donaldson, and so I learned how to write in a variety of ways. When I got to college, the concept of an essay seemed foreign and alien to me, but I wrote well enough to get by, in spite of not knowing any of the core concepts of how to write an essay...a Thesis, organized body statements, a cohesive conclusion, etc. I eventually learned the format, but since I was homeschooled through my junior high and high school period, I was never formally taught how to do it. So therefore, I suppose I had a good baseline to start with, and I simply picked up what I needed to know from English 1010 and English 2010, and refined that ability through all the various other essay papers that I had to write here up at Weber with all my various classes. So I guess I learned it naturally, and never had a problem with it.

After all that long rambling, I suppose there’s not much else to say. I suppose I've said the word "suppose" a lot. I started out well, and I learned what I needed to know.

So, it’s not 500 words, only a measly 399 until this paragraph, but I suppose it should work. I mean I could stretch it out until then, but I think it’d do a disservice to simply waste time and space for something that was put more simply and succinctly already. Or maybe I'm just lazy, but I feel I've said what I needed to say.

And...colored text ftw!

A Prompt . . . With A Bit of History

We've been talking a great deal about ESL, and while that's great, it's not all there is, nor is it the only kind of tutoring session you're going to have. You will, soon, have sessions with regular old traditional college students, some of whom will simply have no idea why their respective instructors have required them to go to the WC. Some of them will be utterly heartbroken about it.

Why? If you ask them, they might say something like "I've always gotten 'As' in High School English," which is a pretty common response to a bad grade on a Composition essay.

I had the same experience. I always got As in HS English. I won local and regional writing competitions in HS—I once even placed in a national competition and received an invitation to the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC for the awards ceremony. But when I got to college, my grades on essays my freshman year were most decidedly not what I was accustomed to. I tried and tried to write better essays. I tried and tried to sort out what I was doing wrong—like many young students, I was taking it personally. And like many young students, I didn't bother to ask my professors what my problems with writing were (one of them was kind enough to draw an enormous X across an entire page of one of my essays and write "B.S." in huge letters in the margin). We didn't have a writing center.

So I asked my roommate for help. Writing seemed to come more naturally to him than it did to me. We printed out one of my essays on dot-matrix paper (the kind that's connected with a perforated edge) and spread it out across our kitchen floor so we could see the whole thing at once.

And he walked me through it. Thesis. Topic sentences. Connecting the dots. Making points. Organizing points. All of it. After that, writing essays was much, much less mystical. Writing essays grew easier and easier. My grades got better and better.

It would be inaccurate to say that no one had ever taught me to do this before. I'm certain that in my HS English classes, someone, somewhere taught me how to do all of this; I'd simply ignored or forgotten it, and so it took getting my butt kicked in a few classes and a good bit of help from my roommate to get it alll to sink in properly.

And so I ask you: how did you learn to write essays? Did it come naturally to you? Did you have some teacher, somewhere, who lifted a fog for you?

I hurt my head...

Okay, first two sessions were cake in comparison to the absolute doozey I was hit up with this week. It is ESL week so I was working with…an ESL student. The paper was…a grammar nightmare. I’m not trying to be mean to the student. English is hard. Mainly I felt bad for them. The big problem was I didn’t know where to begin or how to articulate fixing all of the problems. The sentence structure was so...everywhere. And explaining things was a very slow one step at a time process. There were other thoughts happening in the middle of sentences. He would say one thing and then have another idea and then finish his previous thought. I remember trying to explain this and pull the sentence out and try to arrange it. I couldn’t grasp his thesis to the very end. I wanted to help him put his thesis in the beginning, but I just ran out of time and exhausted the student. I spent a long time trying to explain and engage him on the errors of his paper, but getting him to understand his mistakes on his own was just not happening. I read aloud and sometimes I had him read aloud to see if he understood the changes we made. The story summary was about a man who cared for his son while he was sick, but the student was absolutely focused on the fact that there was no mother figure present in the story. I really feel that this was a cultural reaction to the story. He just kept reiterating there was no mom, there were no women, where were the women? I kept him there for an hour; my longest session. And he didn’t tell me he had class! He had class. I did notice in the last couple of minutes he was really looking at his watch, but we were on the last sentence so I just wanted to push through. I didn’t know. I thought he would tell me about something like that.

I feel like I am over thinking my sessions. Why can’t all this just come natural? I have to keep reminding myself to put the paper in front of him and to let the student hold the pen and to ask the questions and to read body language. Come on. How much to this can there be? I know the answer…a lot, enough. Whatever. This session made me so nervous. I’m honestly afraid I put the kid off tutoring. I kept trying to find things he did right but there was really nothing to compliment and I wanted o fix all the mistakes. Really the only thing I covered was sentence structure and a few grammar issues, but it seemed really important. The student had no grasp from what I can tell on the subject. I just remember that by the end of that session I was absolutely exhausted. It was maybe three in the afternoon and all I wanted to do was fall asleep. I didn’t even know a tutoring session could do that to a person. But I suppose there was way more than just a few simple problems. My brain was hurting for two reasons: figuring out how to fix the problem and how to explain this to the student so he would understand.

ESL flop

I just completed my first shifts today. The first hour I worked no one came in. So, I decided to re-read the English assignment discussing ESL students. The information seemed very clear and concise. I liked the organization of the piece because it was manageable. There were different examples and explanations that helped me think through scenarios and how I would handle the varying situations. After the two hour break, I was really excited to start tutoring. I felt very prepared. The articles and lectures and conversations in class seemed to have given me sufficient background for my first session. I knew that I would not know everything, but I envisioned very smooth sessions.

I began working my second shift at six. The first tutee came in; I was too shy to start the session. I asked Jenny if I could observe her on the first session. She did very well. She began asking the tutee about the assignment and what she wanted to get out of the paper. I thought that Jenny’s questions were very thought provoking and the tutee seemed to gain a better understanding of what she wanted from the paper by having to answer those questions. I actually began to feel quite intimidated because I know that asking those types of questions does not come naturally to me. I prefer answering which is a problem. I should not answer for the tutee, but instead of finding good questions for them, I just give the answer.

The second person came in. I said that I would like to watch and maybe give a few opinions-trying to ease into my own session. He had a full paper, and Jenny asked him to read it out loud. I did not realize how many different types of papers there would be. I knew that we covered across the curriculum, but I have never done a time management paper. I did not take the first year experience class, so I began to feel like I would not be able to help anyone. This was a concern of mine before; I did not know if I would be able to tutor different subjects because I have not gone through those classes. This, however, turned out to be a little easier than I thought. The tutee asked how the flow of his paper was, and I was able to give him some pointers, and I also showed his a few small errors to watch for. I am still a little nervous about tutoring some types of papers just in case the tutor asks about things I do not know anything about.

Finally, I got the courage to do my first session. This just happened to be an ESL student. I thought, “Great! We just covered techniques about this!” Well, I did not do as well as I thought. I ended up working with her for 45 minutes! I had a lot of trouble finding different ways to word incorrect phrases. I know I need to cut down on my time by finding patterns and fixing bigger errors. In this case, we went through her whole paper, and fixed all of the comprehension problems and a few tense and article errors. But, on the positive side, Jenny was watching me and helping me out during my session, and after the session, she told me that she really liked how I paused and asked the tutee if she understood or had any questions or if that is what she wanted to say. So, I do well at clarifying, but I need to find patterns quickly and give a few examples.

I believe I have FINALLY had a real session! Yes! Hold your applause, thank you! In fact, I think I may say I have had two successful sessions. Can I say that I feel so much better now? I can do it!

My first session was pretty cool. I immediately realized that my strength is probably that I have no problem talking to complete strangers. I never have. I’ve made friends out of strangers at airports, ski resorts, and amusement parks all over the United States because I never can sit quietly longer than 2 minutes. Soon, my tutee and I were laughing about odd things: How strange it was that I have never heard of Strongbad before my Methods in Tutoring class, how neither of us really know how to say “kinesthetic”, and how odd it is that we can idolize the same brother who teases us relentlessly. We were able to look over his paper and still have a good time.

My weakness was that, as I had suspected would be my problem, was I kept feeling like I was taking over the session. I kept asking the tutee “Am I helping? Is this what you meant to say?” etc. and he would say in reply “I’m here to see if it sounds good to you, so if you think it sounds better another way, I’m all for it.” Not exactly what I wanted to hear. Yes, I’m supposed to help his paper be more clear, but I’m more or less supposed to be prompting him, not doing his work. So after that session was done, I observed Kassie doing a session. After asking the tutee what the assignment was, she asked “Now what are your concerns?” So simple, and yet I hadn’t asked my tutee that before. We talked about it later and she said that question helps her keep session in focus. At the end, she can look at what his concerns are and say “Yes, I did what he wanted me to do.” Another thing Kassie did was to ask the tutee to grab a pen so if the tutee wants to change something, they won’t be hesitant. Kassie said that another tutor had taught her that a tutor shouldn’t even write on the paper. Have the tutee make the marks, and then the tutor knows she isn’t going over the line.

All in all, tutoring was a lot easier than I expected it to be. I heard stories of tutees crying in sessions, or being angry at the tutor for making suggestions, and I wasn’t sure how common that was. So far, both of my tutees were VERY nice.. no breakdowns YET. It’s been more like I’m helping a friend with a paper. I know that’s what a tutee is, but I never looked at it exactly that way.

For my second tutee, after I asked what the assignment was, I asked her what her concerns were. Then, I handed her a pen and as we read through the paper. She marked her own paper. :)

So the moral of the story is: I shouldn’t have worried so much and if you want an ice breaker, go with Strongbad!