At this point in my "career" as a student consultant, I feel I am finally getting the hang of the basics. True, there are about a million and one different things to learn in this field--and I don't expect to learn or experience them all in this lifetime--, but I feel comfortable enough to tackle these as they come with much more confidence than I had in the beginning of the semester. Out of this weeks readings, I found two articles that were of particular interest to me and were relevant to recent questions that had arisen from my experiences in the center.
The first article is Jeff Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” Since I’ve begun working in the Center, we’ve been talking about all these different approaches and philosophies and I can honestly say that none of them have really given me the warm fuzzys. Brooks’ approach/philosophy is probably the closest thing that I can embrace for my own--for now. Maybe this makes me sound like an asshole. I’ve heard about Brooks before he was even assigned. I remember Jenny asking me one day, “are you going to read Minimalist Tutoring? That guy is weird. He suggested basically ignoring students.” This did two conflicting things inside of me. At one end, I couldn’t wait to read this crazy guy’s rant. And, on the other hand, I didn’t really want to read it at all because I figured it would be a huge waste of my time. Little did I know, I would end up idolizing this guy way over in left field.
Honestly, I think Brooks is pretty brilliant. Although his approach is “minimalist”, he does capture the essence of what this type of “peer-collaborative” tutoring should be. It can be compared to modern art or fine dining. The ingredients are few and the process is simple and“far more important than the product”, but the outcome is precisely what’s needed--nothing more and nothing less (170). I agree that writing--especially academically--can be a “dull and unrewarding activity for most students” and that “students write to learn, not to make perfect papers” (170). This is why Brooks’ approach is so gratifying to me. According to Brooks’ (notice I didn’t say North, Bruffee, or Elbow) all I basically need to do is sit next to the student, make sure the paper is in front of them--not me, make an effort to make the student do all the writing, and have the student tackle the paper by reading aloud with a pencil in their hand. In addition to this simple process add a few key ingredients: a compliment about the writing, ask leading questions, and give the students a task--and make sure they execute it (this is a huge confidence boost to struggling students). I also agree that if a student is expecting a “fix-it-shop”, I should give them the cold shoulder. It’s not that I don’t want to help the student, but rather that I am not willing to do a student’s work for them; it is simply not my responsibility to edit.
The second article that interested me was Carol Severino’s “Avoiding Appropriation.” I felt like I could relate to the desire to sound like a native speaker in my writing. When I was in the Defense Language Institute learning Russian I was required, every day, to write stories about different aspects of my life and experiences in Russian. This was always a difficult and daunting task. Even after a year of eight-hour-a-day training, it still took me four times as long to write a story in Russian than it did in my native language. I would constantly stumble on writing English phrasing and structure in Russian, rather than writing the way a native Russian would. This was extremely frustrating to me because I was not trying to preserve my native language’s voice. I needed to sound as Russian as possible.
This experience has enabled me to empathize with ESL students who come into the Center wanting to make sure their “paper sounds ok”. But, how do you accomplish this using Brooks’ approach? Severino provided a method to accomplish this by defining appropriation and when it would be appropriate. It is all circumstantial, only using appropriation when needed to reach an end goal outside of the student’s control.
I felt like both of these articles helped me out and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they work out in practice--I will be testing them both!
