What a Week!

This was one of those "if it could go wrong it did go wrong" kind of weeks for me. I was sick, overwhelmed with too many credits in school, and my eternal hunt for a new house turned sour again. The only thing that really did seem in my favor this week was the Center.

At the beginning of this week I had my first consult. I had been sitting in on consults earlier in the morning with both Cassie and Phil; and both of those had gone pretty well. With Phil’s consult, it had been more of a tag team than an observation and I had the opportunity to contribute quite a bit. So I guess you could say the consulting juices were flowing hot in my veins when my opportunity arose.

It was a point in the center when everyone was busy and I was all alone in front of the computer recording the prior consults of the day. In walked a student without an appointment who was looking for some last minute help. I turned to Joy and she asked if I wanted to take it. I hadn’t expected that, but I was totally pumped. Eden became handy, so she joined me and we tackled the consult together. The consult went pretty smoothly. The student was mainly in the final revision stage and just wanted to make sure he was getting his point across (which he was). We helped him clean up the paper a bit and made his paper sound more “native” english, since he was spanish speaker. The session went a little beyond a half hour, but like Melissa said in class, that was ok not to be concerned with that.

In hindsight, I would have approached the consult differently. Eden and I made corrections for him, but we didn’t really teach him how to fix his own mistakes--talk about “fix it shop”! I was observing a consult with Jenny later in the week and saw how she let the student squirm a little. It wasn’t that she wasn’t helping him, she just didn’t do the work. Instead, she’d offer a few suggestions or explain why what they wrote was wrong, but never outright fixed anything. I thought this was a much better approach than what Eden and I did.

Even though our consult wasn’t perfect, I (of course) got super excited and wanted to start consulting regularly. Our reading for the week also got me fired up. I was super into Fulwiler’s piece. To me, it was incredibly inspiring and an eye opener. He had so many great ideas to help writing students! I know that not all of them are always feasible in the Writing Center, but I’m willing to get creative. If anything, these are great ideas for my future students. Melissa reigned me in a little from jumping on the consultant bandwagon, but I can feel it coming. Bring the Walk-In’s on! I’m (almost) ready.