Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you all have survived the snowstorm and are safe at home in your warm cozy houses.

I'm writing in regards to the possibility of a Writing event. I recently had dinner with President Dooley, and he expressed interest in meeting with different student groups from campus. You can sign up through student senate, and spend the evening at the president's house for dinner, games, and general tomfoolery. I thought it might be nice to look into this as an event for the writing center crew, with the possibility of writing the consultants as well? I recently recieved a message from one of the students from my WRT 353 class, asking how my semester was. It occured to me then that we haven't seen the consultants at all! I thought it would be nice to meet up with them, chat, and increase our presence on campus.

Thoughts and feelings?

Enjoy the break, everyone!

A Closing Remark

This is just to say "Thank you!" to all who presented the past two Wednesdays. I was intrigued by the variety of approaches and the abundance of excellent points raised. Moreover, the execution matched the quality of the content! I do have to say that the "alienation" (a concept that I am professionally interested in) and the "deux ex machina" have kept me ruminating since (thank you, Angela, for the thought!).
I hope that everyone's semester concludes smoothly and successfully!

Info Request

I was remembering this morning an announcement from a few weeks back about an environmental essay contest in RI. I've got a handful of students with environmental topics form WRT 106 and a bunch of them have shown interest in taking their work further, for publishing or perhaps this type of contest.

Could I get some more info on that contest? Thanks!

Tutoring students from other disciplines

Last week I ran into one of the situations I've been most afraid of as a new tutor -- tutoring a grad student from a discipline I know absolutely nothing about. I've been worrying about this happening all semester! Tutoring undergrads, I feel fairly confident, especially when their papers are for a class I'm familiar with, like an English, Writing, or Philosophy class. But I've been nervous about how much I'd be able to help a grad student, especially one from a discipline that I have no experience with. I was nervous about whether or not I would be taken seriously, if the tutee would be able to figure out my cluelessness, and that I wouldn't be helpful at all.

Well, it happened. I got a tutee who was a graduate student in Accounting. When I found this out I had a moment of panic, trying to think of anything at all I knew about Accounting, which of course was nothing. He pulled out the paper that he wanted help with. And then he said...

"I'm mostly done with the paper, I just need some help with the citations."

I was immediately relieved. Citations are something I can do! As an English major, I am very familiar with MLA and not at all with any other style. I had no idea what style an Accounting paper should use, so I asked the tutee, and he didn't really know either, so he called a friend in the class who said their professor didn't care. I wasn't sure this was right, but what could I do? The tutee said that what he was familiar with was APA. So I quickly found the Longman handbook and flipped to the APA section. The tutee and I went through his list of sources and found the correct ways to cite each one.

I didn't think the session was bad -- it certainly went better than I'd initially expected -- but I did feel badly that the Longman handbook seemed to be doing more tutoring than I was doing. However, I don't know APA, so it was necessary.

How have other tutors handled situations like this?

Helpful Tutees

Lately, I have had some great sessions with students. The sessions are interactive and the tutee and I are on the same wavelength, it is such a great feeling to have. Especially because this is the first time I have ever been in the tutor position, it makes me feel really good about my abilities and helping others. With three consecutive awesome sessions, reality slapped me in the face with my fourth session. It's makes a session much more difficult when the tutee is not an active participant. I didn't even feel like the boy was shy, just that he simply did not care about the paper or my input. It was really frustrating because as tutors, people come to us looking for help. Why should I be digging into a person for some kind of inkling of desire to better a paper if they don't even want to be here in the first place? Obviously, I push this kind of thought out of my mind during the session but as soon as he left, I became very frustrated. I like being a directive tutor but I also really enjoy the laid back approach. Both are useful tactics for tutoring but being directive is totally necessary with certain kids. I'm mostly venting right now, because I know experiencing with a wide range of tutees makes me a better tutor. I just think that having a session with a tutee who is passionate about the paper makes the session much more helpful, for both the tutee and the tutor. Any thoughts? Similar experiences?

She's a regular

In light of such an incredibly stressful week full of final projects, presentations and preperations of final exams, I'd like to shed some light on a success story, as I'd like to call it.

I think it was in my second month of tutoring that I had an appointment booked with a girl who I'll call Jennifer. She can be described in three p words; pretty, poised and promising. The first day that I met her, she came in with her laptop, slid it over to me, and told me her paper was due in two hours. She then proceeded to tell me that she was a senior (a year my senior, no pun intended!) and knew how to write. Interesting I thought, someone who actually knows how to write!

Nonetheless, this was a little out of the ordinary for me to hear from a fellow student, usually it's,"I'm not a writing major"-->therefore don't judge me or, "I'm not used to college level writing" -->therefore my paper might be a little high school.

Needless to say, she was confident; and as she continued to tell me about her seniority etc. I think she even began questioning why someone as poised and old as she, needed to even visit the writing center.

I mentioned to her politely that we could just look over it together and see what we could come up with, but still, she was left a little weary as to how this process was to go. As I read her paper aloud, she was extremely apprehensive towards what I might have to say. About twenty-five minutes later, we both continued to mark up her paper with ideas, minor errors, underdeveloped areas, strong points etc. and even began talking about structuring and re-organizing paragraphs (not being afraid to move sentence 3-4 over to another paragraph etc.). It was sometime mid-session, that something really clicked.

By the end of the session, even her shoulders had become relaxed, and her attitude had completely left the room. Somehow, by keeping an extremely passive and calm demeanor as I tutored her, had led her to no longer view me as a threat or a critic, but as a fellow student that could simply help her see a few things she hadn't before.

She left the tutoring session completely satisfied and thanked me for my time. Two weeks ago I saw her in the WC for the second time, and today I saw her there again, working hard on one of her latest papers for that same class.

She's a regular now.

H1N1 and the WC: Update

The H1N1 vaccine is available to students 25 years of age and younger starting today, December 1st from 9AM-5PM, in the Memorial Union. FLUMIST is what will be provided to students, upon the presentation of your URI picture ID card. There is also a limited number of injectable vaccines available to students with nasal conditions, etc. The MIST will be distributed for the next 14 days up in the Union. NOTE: Approximately 400 doses will be available per day; if you plan on receiving the vaccine, perhaps consider heading over there early in the day, to ensure they still have the vaccine in stock on that day.

For more information, visit: http://health.uri.edu/showarticle.php?id=172.