Blog 8: Grammar

When I was growing up, my mom would frequently say to me, "If you can't speak English, that's fine--just let me know what language you can speak, and I'll learn it for your sake." This was her charming (albeit nondescript) way of correcting my grammar, for example, if I answered the phone, "This is him." To this day, she still corrects me whenever she sees any mistake I make--which includes Facebook. My mom's postgraduate work is in linguistics, for what it's worth.

Curiously, however, I don't really remember ever getting "grammar lessons," per se, either by my mother or at school. My mom's form of criticism was only to point out when I had said something improperly--she rarely actually "corrected" my grammar, if that makes sense.

As I get older, what I find more and more interesting is the variety of grammars and dialects with which I am equipped, each servicing different contexts and friendships. When I speak to my cat, for instance--besides sounding like a raging lunatic--the "grammatical rules" of my one-sided discussion lapse into almost nothing. When I speak to activist friends, however, I adopt a strange mix of relaxed inflection and leftist jargon.

When I first meet a student I'm going to tutor, I have this really forced (and therefore phony) friendly voice, and my inflection goes all unnatural. However, when I really get into the paper, and I'm focused, my voice drops into something really slow and quiet (or something), and it seems there's really nothing I can do about it--probably because I can't "intentionally" talk and actually think at the same time.

Discussions about grammar nowadays seem often to question the damage that our contemporary technologies will have on our language. While I think it seems silly to "worry" about such cultural changes, it also seems reductive to doubt that this is different than anxieties about past changes to language, as the scope --and just sheer exponentially greater change--of modern technology will most certainly entail transformative effects to pretty much all of social life, even to the extent that grammar will probably pale by comparison to other changes.

This is one of the most unfocused things I've ever written. Amen.

Blog 7: Anything on my mind

I think it is reasonable to think of "thinking people" in two camps: poets and explorers. To measure the value a poet places on a given discovery an explorer brings back from his voyage is to understand the implications said discovery has on the lives lived by those in the community. Explorers, on the other hand, value the the discovery itself. In other words: whereas the explorer values the thing in itself, the poet's value is a function of its relation to being. 

This distinction plays out in all facets of life, and sometimes in counter-intuitive ways. Freud's psychoanalysis was an attempt to discover the origin of neuroses. As I read him, he was interested discovering the depth of the human psyche itself--Freud was an explorer. Psychologists today are generally concerned with helping clients overcome their mental health, if not to purge them of their ills, to equip patients with tools capable of combatting their, as we say, issues.

Accordingly, if my distinction suffices, I am probably a poet--if unskilled. This helps explain my scientific and mathematical illiteracy. 

I read this today: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/entropy.html

It helped me better understand entropy, but my learning caters not to "the discovery" per se, but to its rhetorical function. In other words, my interest in science (in this case, entropy) is contingent on the role understanding the concept will play in my ability to conceptualize, analyze, and articulate the condition of post-modern society and its relation to the natural world. Reading that article helped me improve my understanding of entropy as a metaphor. 

As it says at the top of the piece, this is an addendum to a piece called "Bad Science, Worse Philosophy" about David Foster Wallace (guy who wrote "Infinite Jest," -- 'the advertisement did what it was supposed to: create an anxiety relievable by purchase). This is significant because Wallace was unequivocally a poet--but (and I haven't read the whole piece) apparently many of his metaphors invoking physics are based on common scientific misunderstandings.

What I've said, I assume, will evoke some reaction on your part. Maybe. Are you an explorer?

Blog 10: Tutoring Resistant / Reluctant Students

Hello Blog!

I can think of two examples of having had to tutor a resistant or reluctant student. My first example was definitely a resistant student. He was a non-native speaker who didn’t seemed to accept me as someone he could look to for help on writing. He challenged almost every mistake I pointed out. Also, he refused to take advice on where he could improve.  I should have realized that he didn’t want my help and that it would be better if I had ended the session quickly, but I tried my best to help him understand and the session ended up being much, much longer than it should have.

I think my second example would probably fall into the category of ‘reluctant’ more than ‘resistant’. He was very friendly and nice and he smiled a lot, but he said he was embarrassed by the content of his paper. He made it very clear, right at the beginning of the session, that he did not want me to read his paper out loud. While still being friendly, he sat back and put his headphones on. I’m not sure if he was just trying to pass the time while I read over his paper, or if he was actively disengaging from the session and pretending to be nice about it. I wasn’t sure how to react, but I read his paper silently anyway and made tick marks on the sides where we could talk about where he could improve. He had written about failing high school and having become addicted to drugs. One night, he overdosed on the drug and almost died. He believed that Christ had saved him for a reason, and he ended up turning his life around and was eventually able to begin studying here at Weber State.

Personally, I thought it was a pretty inspiring story. He should be proud that he had been able to overcome so much hardship; there are many people who can’t overcome their addictions and just give up. I told him that he had nothing to be embarrassed about, and we went over each part where I had seen a mistake or something that could be improved. I was careful not to mention anything specific (like drugs, religion, failing high school) out loud that might embarrass him if someone overheard us talking, since he seemed to be sensitive about one, or all, of these topics. He was engaged and responsive to the suggestions I made, which made me think that he wasn’t trying to disconnect from the session after all.

From what I’ve noticed about resistant versus reluctant students, resistant students have an ego problem that prevents them from accepting that they are wrong and could use some help, while reluctant students realize they need help, but they are just embarrassed or a little insecure about seeking assistance from one of their peers. In the future, I think I would rather have reluctant tutees than resistant ones, as the reluctant ones are much more pleasant and more accepting.

Blog 12

            Being a tutor has most definitely had changed the way that I look at college, approach student life, and understand the system of education. Tutoring has improved my commitment, allowed me to feel comfortable setting higher, more distant goals, improved my understanding of writing, and allowed me to see many varieties of writing. My enjoyment of tutoring has also changed my goals and opened up new career possibilities that I hadn’t previously perceived to be fitting for me. Tutoring is the first job I really pursued with a sure sense of interest. It is the first job that I felt I could find myself enjoying for a long period of time.

Around the time when I started tutoring was when my changed opinion of university really began to take hold. Before entering college I was skeptical about whether or not it was fitting for what I wanted. I knew of the many varieties of subjects and career paths that college made available; however, I was skeptical that any of them were fitting for me.

Luckily, I was sold early on in my first semester. I had a lot of great teachers and started having new ideas about what I might want to do in the future. And it was just after I began contemplating changing my double majors from Psychology and Philosophy to Philosophy and English when I came across the Writing Center. I had thought sort of half-heartedly about teaching English, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to find out if I was interested in English. I had already gotten another job working on computers, for which my interest was waning.

Having originally asked for an OA position, thinking that I would watch other tutors work to see if I wanted to tutor down the road, I was very excited to instead jump right into tutoring. I began reading and reviewing papers with students, and this allowed me a certain amount of experience that I had not previously had. Before, I only had my own drafts to work with; now I could look at the writing process literally from beginning to end and try to analyze and work out a kind of general process for writing in general, and I also learned about the sort of hierarchy of writing concerns which essentially amounts to the same sort of process.

I feel that my work in the writing center has helped me solidify my skill of writing, and now, my main concern is working on solid argumentation and expanding the complexity of my writing. Along with this, I am sure there are some larger and more fundamental concerns which I will run into along the way, but I think that my work in the writing center has definitely improved the construction process of my essays as well as the way I look at and approach my education.