I found it!

I finally found my blog! Now I jsut have to remember that it is under my student email account an not my faculty one. Anyhow, reflections for the week... I really loved the article that we read for Tuesday that focused on different styles of tutorials by McAndrew and Reigstad. The strategies and techniques used, in many cases, were very applicable and useful. I loved that the piece was organized into the different foci that consultations often take, including focus-oriented, developmental and organizational. I really loved the headline/bumper sticker idea, as well as nutshelling and making a promise. I think these are all easy, effective strategies to use in a consultation, or for me, even to articulate to my students. I was happy to get a few new ways to pull ideas out of readers brains, and in the structure secction, I was stoked to see the coloring technique, as it is one that I have personally used and have often recommended to others.

I felt that Muriel Harris's article, "Talk to Me: Engaging Reluctant Writers", discusses an issue that many new tutors may not have though existed: the reluctant writer. I even forget that they exist sometimes. Then I encounter one and I remember, like the writer from 102 that came into the center to work on a research paper. She obviously wasn't happy about needing to come to the center, nor did she like writing research papers at all. Luckily I was able to make her trust me and to buy in to my assistance, and we had a really great session that highlighted how she could choose to organize her paper to make it clearer and better overall, with the focus being on her choice, and not on her having organizational issues. Reflecting on "Talk to Me", in light of this encounter, I appreciate that Harris gives several scenarios for how these writers may act, and why. Even more importantly, her structure of the article gives comcrete examples for tutors to learn from that actually show how to deal with these situations. I know that I will refer to it just to keep in mind some of the strategies I may need or want to employ in some of these "unsuspected" resistant-writer encounters.

One thing that we have mentioned in class and that had come up in our GA meetings with Clyde is how great it is that as Writing Center consultants, we really get to learn a great deal while helping others. This was very evident in my consultations this week, as in most of my appointments, I got to work with non-native speakers. In one, I worked with an assistant professor from the Math Department on a research paper that he (and I assume some of his colleagues) had been working on. It was incredible to me to have this absolutely brilliant Asian man to work with who not only was able to understand, interpret, and work with numbers at an incredibly high level, but who could also communicate those ideas in textual form, and in a totally different language from the one he grew up speaking. I had huge respect for this man, and yet, I was really grateful for the fact that I think I did actually help him. There were a few instances where the subject/verb agreement was an issue, and there were a few other minor grammatical mistakes that, in reading through the piece together, we were able to catch. Also, I think this comes from the FYW program's approach to teaching composition, but as we read through his work, I felt extra-sensitive to the genre conventions that he was working under, which though I am not familiar with research papers in Math, I mentioned he might need to check on. I mentioned this in reference to how he was noting the number of the figures he used inline, and I was grateful that he agreed to check in other texts produced for the same purpose to determine how best to indicate those details.

Overall, I just felt like the whole session was a fantastic opportunity to work towards the "justice and fairness" that we have been discussing all week. Though this was on a very small scale, I just really appreciated that in this consultation I was able to genuinely appreciate this man and his work, and to learn about something that I never would otherwise have been exposed to, just by working in the writing center. So, we may not have been working on pronouns, but this epiphany came about from really sitting down and actually working on other "little things". So I just want to end by saying, that yes, we may deal in details at times, but overall, somethimes it is the little stuff that matters, and in some cases, it does add up to help us work on much larger issues, like those of justice and fairness.