Writing Center Shadow 7

Last week when I arrived at the Writing Center, the consultant I shadow was there on the computer.  A student was scheduled for an appointment, but unfortunately ended up being a No-Show.  The consultant and I chatted for about twenty five minutes and then she said that there wouldn't be enough time for a consultation and she had a Bible Study meeting at 8pm anyway, so we left.  Although this student did not attend, I feel comfortable with the amount of exposure I have had in the Writing Center.  Throughout this course I have felt more drawn to the idea of working with ESL students or in the Athletic Department rather than the Writing Center in Weinstein or assigned a class.  Working with ESL students interests me because I am an International Business Major and a Spanish minor and learning about other cultures has always fascinated me.  I enjoy hearing about how people interact in other cultures and what education is like for them back home.  Consulting in the Athletic Department also interests me, since I am in the area frequently for cheerleading.  Also, I figure that I can actually meet the athletes whom I cheer for.  Its always strange knowing these football players and basketball players by name and attending all their games, yet having never met the majority of them before.

Proposal for Final Project

For the final project, those of us who wanted to do a project rather than an advice sheet discussed potential ideas.  Some had already figured out what they were doing.  A small group of us who were not quite certain about what we wanted to do for the project discussed ways in which the Writing Center could improve and increase its involvement and availability on campus.  We came up with a number of ideas of how the Writing Center could make itself more aware to students that it is a way to improve all writers, not just those in First Year courses.  One idea we had was to expand the availability of the Writing Center by offering stations in various parts of campus, such as Modlin and Gottwald to attract those students who may be deterred by the long walk at night to the Writing Center in Weinstein.  Also, we discussed holding open hours for students, similar to what the Career Development Center does Monday through Wednesday from 2 to 4pm.  Through this, students can ask about their thesis statements or outline organization or a quick grammar question.  Students will get a taste for what a consultation is like and be more motivated to schedule a full consultation time slot.  As a liberal arts school, there are a wide variety of subjects that students are involved, which all require some sort of writing task.  However, students in the sciences or in Robins School of Business may think the Writing Center would not help them.  This is not true because any kind of writing may be brought to the Writing Center.  The other day Professor Dolson and I talked about how writing is moving away from the third person voice towards the first person, even in formal writing.  As a business major, it is very useful to learn how to present my ideas formally in the first person, something that I am not accustomed to after years of being told that all academic writing must be in the third person.  The Writing Center should advertise that it is available to help with lab reports, speeches, and finance papers.  This would allow more students to realize that the Writing Center truly is a place for the wide spectrum of whatever is writing.  Additionally, the Writing Center does not have to be contained for academic writing.  Students should be open to the idea of bring cover letters for prospective job offers, study abroad applications, and internship reports to the Writing Center as well.  The Writing Center has a great deal of potential in what it can offer students, but it is a matter of putting these ideas into action to make the Writing Center a valuable resource that reaches all students.

Boys and Girls Club Visit 3

Last Monday was our third and final visit to the Boys and Girls Club, when the 7th grade girl I had been working with for the past two visits arrived, we went right to the computers.  Once we loaded up the flash drive onto the computer and found her narrative document, we began to prepare for recording.  First, we read through the document once to make corrections and allow for easier readability.  We also changed some parts to make it more clear to the reader what meaning the student was trying to evoke.  Once we had made all the necessary changes, the student read through her narrative twice to practice before recording.  Although she was still unsure of her reading, I encouraged her to try it out and told her we could try multiple times.  For the first two recordings she had read it all the way through in one segment.  She stumbled over a couple of sentences and hesitated at points, so she wanted to try again.  When I hit play from the beginning by accident, I noticed her face freeze.  I asked her what was wrong and why she stopped speaking, she began to laugh and say that she thought her voice sounded strange over recording.  I explained to her that I felt the same way both times when I did my Digital Story for English 383 and Expository Writing.  It seems to be a common trait that no one likes hearing their own voice over a recording because how we perceive our voice when we are speaking is different from how machinery records it and is different from how others hear it.  I suggested recording from a different approach.  I separated her narrative into shorter segments and told her to just read one segment at a time and to then stop.  She recorded in this manner so that when she did stumble over a word or misread it, we could erase the segment and start it over again, without having to record everything over.  Throughout reading she maintained an even pace.  Her reason for doing this was because she didn't think her narrative was long enough, but in the end it made for an easy-to-understand recording.  Although it may seem like a lot of work for a project that isn't even for school, the girl I was working with seemed still interested in the project and continuing to the next phase of her "Pearl of Wisdom" digital story in which she will add images to her voice.

CMP Tutoring Session 2

On Saturday we met with the students from the College Mentoring Program again to help them with their college essays.  I worked with the same girl that I had worked with last time and she was very proud about the paper she had completed to bring in to the meeting.  We read through her essay and when we came across a typo, she was very defensive about overlooking it, making it evident through her demeanor that she had put in a great deal of work into her essay.  Her essay was about how her grandmother became very sick and began shaking out of coldness.  Because the girl I was working with is the only one in her family who is able to speak English, she called 911.  She then further discussed in her college essay how she felt she her grandmother be put into the back of the ambulance, riding in the car with her mother to the hospital in a panic, and how nerve-wrecking it was to be in the waiting room as her grandmother was with the doctors.  Once she and her mother were allowed to see her grandmother, they cared for her by being very attentive to her motions and assisting her with her bathroom needs.  The student I was working this defined this moment as the time she realized she wanted to become a nurse.  Once we read through the essay, I talked with her about the experience and how that was an excellent choice to explain her career goals.  The prompt for VCU, the nursing program she is interested in, asked the applicant to explain his or her educational and career goals.  Because she had explained her career goal in her concluding sentences, we discussed how she could incorporate what her education goals were and why, which was to ultimately become a nurse.  Once we figured out how we could incorporate her ideas about becoming a nurse and being the first person in her family to go to college into her career goals, we formed sentences as she noted them at the bottom of her page.  After this exercise, we started from the beginning and tried to combine some of her sentences.  As I read aloud, I noticed that her sentences were short and often began similarly, which tends to be a pet peeve of mine in writing.  We were able to figure out what ideas could be combined into one sentence and also tried to eliminate some words that caused wordiness since we had added more to the end.  I discussed with her the changes that I suggested making before she made any edits to her paper and after she made edits, we reread the sentence aloud.  Her paper definitely improved after working together.  She had just needed someone to help her talk out the connections between her education goals and career goals, which is a primary function of writing consultations.

Boys and Girls Club Visit 2

Yesterday at the Boys and Girls Club I worked with the same girl as I had two weeks ago.  She had already had her interview completed last time I was there, and for this time she had gone through and underlined the parts that she thought were important to include in her Digital Story.  We went on the computer and she began to type what she wanted to say in her digital story.  She became frustrated after typing three words because she had not had received any training in typing in her school as I had and it took her a while to type one key at a time.  Although she is a very intelligent girl, this is when I most significantly noticed where the education system that she was in differed from the one I was in when I was in seventh grade.  When I was her age I had a year-long typing class in which we sat at computers for 45 minutes a day and completed a typing program in which we were tested on our accuracy and speed in typing.  Rather than have her spend more time on typing than thinking about what she wanted to say, I typed what she dictated to me for the story she wanted to tell.  Once she went through everything that she thought was important, her content only reached to the bottom of the first page.  I asked her to explain what the pearl of wisdom "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything" meant to her.  She then elaborated on how that phrase applied to her  Once she was out of ideas for adding to that, she asked me what else she could add.  I suggested that she add more about the woman she interviewed.  As she dictated to me how she knew her, I asked her what other positive qualities the woman she interviewed had and led the student to want to interview this woman.  At the end of the session, an observing student asked the girl i was working with if she could tell her what she had learned from me.  The girl from the Boys and Girls Club initially said that I taught her that longer was better.  She then proceeded to say that I tried to draw detail and more meaning out of what she had said previously in order to make it longer.  Also, the girl said that I made her think about what the significance of everything was that she said and how it all related together.  The observing student's questioning to the girl I was helping allowed me to realize that I actually had helped in her writing.  Not only did I reduce the amount of frustration she would have felt while typing, she also learned to elaborate on the points that most relate to her thesis- the "pearl of wisdom".

Writing Center Shadow 6

Last week at the Writing Center, the fellow that I tutored strongly encouraged me to lead the consultation.  An international student from Singapore came in to brainstorm for his essay for his First Year Seminar class.  The class was about moral and economics in the United States, so his assignment was to compare Adam Smith's ideas with the current recession and the moral of people today and whether Smith's ideas applied.  I thought this consultation went very well for me because it was something that I was interested in and it was just a brainstorming phase.  Consultations that involve structure are the most difficult for me because I have difficulty with thesis statements and structure when writing my own papers.  The student brought in a page of notes he had written for this assignment and we discussed recent scandals in business and policies that have been made.  As a Business major, I found a lot of topics to discuss with him.  Because he is an international student, he was unsure of what was meant by aspects of the economy such as "Federal Reserve Bank" and "Fractional Reserve Banking System".  I was able to explain these topics to him to the best of my ability, but I also told him to consult his professor if he had more questions.  He took down notes of what he thought he could best explain in relation to moral and Adam Smith's ideas.  This consultation was exciting for me because we were discussing topics that interest the student and I and we were in the preliminary phases of planning so there were not specific issues to solve.

Cultural Barriers

For today's class, we read articles about working with ESL students in the Writing Center.  It seems as though the concept of international relations has been coming up in all of my class and that it is currently a very important topic.  Because countries interact regularly and are made up of many different nationalities and cultures, learning habits of different cultures can be beneficial to avoid disrespecting the person you are working with, particularly in the Writing Center.  In my Business Communications class, we focus a great deal on dealing with interpersonal communications abroad.  For instance, in Asia pauses between conversation are common in order to give the decision maker time to contemplate.  However, Americans see these pauses as a chance to provide more input to whatever idea they are trying to sell.  This can be seen as interruptive and rude in other cultures.

Mentoring with Tina

As mentioned in the article, the author is from a background in which her mother and father supported her strongly throughout her education and she never had a doubt in her mind that she would go to college.  This sounds very similar to the type of environment that I grew up in and the majority of students at my high school as well as at University of Richmond.  This article relates to the Boys and Girls Club because like the narrator, we do not know whether these students are engrained with the notion that you can't succeed if you don't go to college.  Although Tina did not have any desire to go to college or even try in high school, she still had powerful ideas.  Unfortunately, the teachers did not give her a chance to express her wisdom before they judged her.  This article exemplifies the old saying "you can't judge a book by its cover".  The teachers marked her down when they saw all the grammatical errors, but they did not understand the message that Tina was trying to convey about the courage in her father's death and his heroic actions.  Passengers on the bus held their belongings closer as she walked passed because they assumed she was mischievous based on her appearance.  Rather than getting to know Tina, the teachers and principal condemned her before getting to the root of the issue.  This story shows that although someone may act tough and as though he or she is not concerned with the future, it is possible that the behavior is a need for friendship.  At the Boys and Girls Club, although the students may seem uninterested with performing the work needed for a digital story, the fact of the matter is that they may just give off that appearance when in reality the new experience excites them.

Writing Center Shadow 5

It seems as though I tend to delay blogging about my Writing Center shadowing sessions until a week later, right before my next session.  Last week, the writing consultant and I discussed an essay with a student in a First Year Seminar class.  The assignment topic was to compare the ideas about racism between two black men.  The student was very confident about his work, which contained a great deal of well developed ideas.  However, some of his ideas did not flow together well and he was missing transitions at times.  In his conclusion, he discussed a point that would have added significance to one of the points he made earlier in the essay.  This student was very interested in why some suggestions made by the writing consultant would work better than what he had originally.  Also, he had his paper completed on the Monday evening, even though the paper was not due until Friday.  This allowed the writing consultant to offer assistance via email to him throughout the week if he wanted to revise sections that he noted had issues.  I thought this was a great way to create a bond with the student being consultant because it is a way to make the student feel confident about his or her writing because the consultant is looking forward to revisiting the piece.

Boys and Girls Club Visit

On Monday, we went to the Boys and Girls Club in Richmond to help the students there plan their digital stories to honor someone in the community and their "pearl of wisdom".  I worked with a 7th grade girl from the community.  She had done her interview and had the responses typed up.  However, to interview her mother's supervisor at the local church, she had simply emailed the questions that the Boys and Girls Club had given her and then the lady responded to each question.  We watched digital stories on YouTube and the one that I had created for class.  It was hard to hear the narrative, but she found the pictures interesting.  I explained to her how she could take pictures of different things to provide a visual for the story she was telling.  She had a digital camera, but I also explained to her that she could find images on Flickr as well by searching.  In regards to the narrative, she seemed wary about how she would create a story from the responses she received.  I explained how she could introduce the woman she interviewed and what meaningful aspects of her life coincided with her Pearl of Wisdom.  The Pearl of Wisdom was "if you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything", which I thought was a great piece of advice.  Between loading videos and the end of a discussion about a component of the digital story, I tried asking her questions about other things, but she would give me one word responses.  Throughout our time together, she seemed unmotivated about the narrative aspect, yet she liked seeing examples of digital stories on YouTube and about the idea of using a digital camera.  I look forward to meeting with her next time to see how she was able to incorporate her voice into what she learned from the woman she had interviewed and what types of images she chooses to support her narrative.

UR Downtown 1

For my meeting with a student at UR Downtown about Digital Stories, I am first going to present a Digital Story to him or her.    I found one on YouTube that I found interesting called Media Influence that a student created for her sociology class.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l-knO8zzmU . This digital story creates emotion, has effective images, and evokes a new perspective from the audience.  I'll explain my process to the student that I used to create my digital story for English 383 and English 103.  First gather information, then create a narrative, then cut it down so it contains the most important information.