With great power comes great responsibility ... Thanks, Spidey
Stop me if you've heard this one: A student walks into the Writing Center and says, "I've got a five-page paper due in half an hour and I've got to get an A or all my med school dreams go down the porcelain express!" The tutor shakes her head and says, "But I just want to make you a better writer ..."
Ideally, both student and tutor get their way, right? During the whirlwind thirty-minute session, the student naturally absorbs all of the nutritious grammatical, syntactical, and organizational goodness and in the process produces a candy-coated confection of writing perfection (sorry for that ... it's rather late). But what if your tutoring session doesn't turn out like a scene from "Writing Center II -- Dreams Come True"? Which one -- better writer or better writing -- should wind up with the upper hand? Sure, you could clandestinely whip out your red Sharpie (which Claire so thoughtfully provided us with at the orientation), make a few quick proofreading marks, and send the student whistling out the doorway, since that was what they really wanted anyway ... but then you go home feeling cheap and a little dirty and nobody really wants that, now, do they?
And we all know the adage, "Give a man a fish ..." But what if he's trying to use a sharpened stick instead of a fishing pole? What if you have to gently nudge him toward the lake because he's dangling his pole in the kitchen sink? Or what if the assignment was to catch trout and he's out hunting boar? At what point do you tell him to throw it all out the window? (Hmmm ... I seem to remember some mention being made in Friday's class of the overuse of rhetorical questions as well ... Oh, well).
To the point: as a piano teacher, I'm always more willing to pass off an assigned piece if the student has grasped the concept she was supposed to learn in the piece. Sure, she played the entire song in D minor when it was written in C major, but the fortes were loud and the pianissimos were soft. Of course we aren't the ones grading the papers we're helping with -- we don't get to decide if the assignment gets "passed off" --but if, after a tutoring session a student walks out the door and never uses the word "irregardless" again, everyone's going to be happy. And if the "student" never "inappropriately" uses "quotation marks" in another "piece of writing" for the rest of her "life," everyone's going to be euphoric. Ultimately, the concepts gained from these sessions in the Writing Center will serve to improve the papers the students write throughout the rest of their academic career -- something far more important (though it may be hard to convince the students of this) than one wee little bitty A in a 1010 class.
By keeping this end in mind, we all go home happy. And no one feels cheap and dirty.
Ideally, both student and tutor get their way, right? During the whirlwind thirty-minute session, the student naturally absorbs all of the nutritious grammatical, syntactical, and organizational goodness and in the process produces a candy-coated confection of writing perfection (sorry for that ... it's rather late). But what if your tutoring session doesn't turn out like a scene from "Writing Center II -- Dreams Come True"? Which one -- better writer or better writing -- should wind up with the upper hand? Sure, you could clandestinely whip out your red Sharpie (which Claire so thoughtfully provided us with at the orientation), make a few quick proofreading marks, and send the student whistling out the doorway, since that was what they really wanted anyway ... but then you go home feeling cheap and a little dirty and nobody really wants that, now, do they?
And we all know the adage, "Give a man a fish ..." But what if he's trying to use a sharpened stick instead of a fishing pole? What if you have to gently nudge him toward the lake because he's dangling his pole in the kitchen sink? Or what if the assignment was to catch trout and he's out hunting boar? At what point do you tell him to throw it all out the window? (Hmmm ... I seem to remember some mention being made in Friday's class of the overuse of rhetorical questions as well ... Oh, well).
To the point: as a piano teacher, I'm always more willing to pass off an assigned piece if the student has grasped the concept she was supposed to learn in the piece. Sure, she played the entire song in D minor when it was written in C major, but the fortes were loud and the pianissimos were soft. Of course we aren't the ones grading the papers we're helping with -- we don't get to decide if the assignment gets "passed off" --but if, after a tutoring session a student walks out the door and never uses the word "irregardless" again, everyone's going to be happy. And if the "student" never "inappropriately" uses "quotation marks" in another "piece of writing" for the rest of her "life," everyone's going to be euphoric. Ultimately, the concepts gained from these sessions in the Writing Center will serve to improve the papers the students write throughout the rest of their academic career -- something far more important (though it may be hard to convince the students of this) than one wee little bitty A in a 1010 class.
By keeping this end in mind, we all go home happy. And no one feels cheap and dirty.
posted by Em at 11:01 PM
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