Signs--and Comfort

As a modest recommendation, we might take down this sign. And, we're all about writing right? "The No Cell Phones!" message, in my estimation, seems a bit heavy-handed. Just so that I'm being up front, I would like to note that the sign is likely slated to come down based on a converation that some members of our community had today. But, I'd like to think more about what this sign means nevertheless. First of all, I can see the utility of the sign: using cellphones in the WC can be distracting, rude, and, well, there are many more not so nice descriptors we could add to the list. So, perhaps, revising the sign to say (something) differently might be more appropriate.

What could the sign say? It's likely that that is better a group discussion. However, I think it should take into account the multitude of positive uses that cellphones can have within the WC. For example, as technological tools--(gonna do a lazy em dash insertion here) such as taking the photo of the picture with my camera phone, so that I may send it to my email, then download it to my computer, and last post it up here as a weblog pic that enables a critique of the space--cellphones tools afford us to do a number of darn-right good writing-practices within a number of space(s).

For example: (please do excuse the colon; and the semi colon, too; but, I gots some addiction issues with mechanical devices) I regularly use a cellphone as clock (because I don't wear a watch) so that I know a session's duration; as a calculator so that I can do mathy type things; as a recording device for verbal reminders to myself that are too long to text (which is also a sort of extended memory device); and, I use it as a research tool. Additionally, I regularly text google for definitions of words (create new text message, enter in google as the number/letter keys correspond, type the letter d and then the word you want to know the defintion to). I write down call numbers in the library so that I don't have to waste paper/and/or worry about if I have paper and a pen(cil).

More specifically in relation to the contexts of the WC, when Kate made this awesome dry-erase board investigation on logical forms, I took the liberty of photographing it so that I could think about it later. (The difficult with dry erase boards is that the content on them changes so quickly, and is then fleetingly lost.) Were visitors to the WC to follow the sign explicitly they would resultantly have lost the ability to engage this this type of memory-enhancing, note taking, writing practice (photographing cool stuff that we make that often goes bye-bye way too soon).

So, in close, I would like to return, briefly, to the comment I made about having the sign say "something" differently. In Multiliteracies for a Digital Age Stuart Selber (building upon the work of Bryan Pfaffenberger) talks about ways that power can fluctuate within technologies to regularize (and even exclude) users and uses of a technology. The WC taken as a technology here (can be critiqued by the heuristic Selber offers) makes me worry about the ways that the WC could be interpreted as a less amiable learning space--we all know it's awesome and fun and rad--but signs like this function to privilege an "ideal" user/use within a space. Specifically, this sign works as a "power move" of "technological regularization" called "delegation" (103). As Pfaffenberger explains, delegation is "a technical feature of an artifact [that] is deliberately designed to make up for presumed moral deficiencies in its users and is actively projected into the social contexts of use" (Selber 103).

How could we work to make it an every more rad place?

Tutoring Subjects

Normally students come into the Writing Center to talk about their writing...usually essays or research or brainstorming. So far this semester,I've only worked with people that have questions about writing that they've already done. Today was kind of weird, though, since both of my sessions wanted help with more grammatical or citation-al aspects.

The student at the first session brought in two punctuation worksheets and just wanted me to go over them with him and help him figure out where to put commas, semicolons, dashes, etc. We went overtime because he wouldn't let me close the session, even though my next tutee was waiting at another table.

The second session's student was here for help with MLA citation because she was afraid of plagiarizing. I showed her the Longman Handbook and answered questions, but when I suggested that we try to fix a couple of the citations in her essay, she said no.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it seems like when students come in who don't want to focus on their writing, they really don't want to get their essays out. It was pretty frustrating to me to see the student's work in her folder but not be able to dig it out and get some work done on that. What if she forgets what I've said by the time she gets home--without any examples written down, how will she know what we'd talked about? And I understand that helping the first student with his punctuation is important, but since it wasn't in the context of an essay, I felt like he could have done the same work in a differing tutoring environment. I know we can't draw the line on students if they want to come here for help, but I just wish that sometimes it felt more relevant.

Sorry about the rant...

Problamatic Encounters

I have had many great tutoring sessions so far this semester. Many of them have been extremely rewarding and we accomplish a great deal. However, i have had encounter two major problems.

Problem 1: Ignorant of the Basics

I had one student that walked in appearing lost, nervous and confused. I immediately felt bad for him. He told me that he had to write a paper analyzing The Fall of the House of Usher. He asked me what i thought he should write for his thesis. He told me what he thought the theme for the paper should be and asked if i thought he was correct. However, I have never read that story and could not tell them if he was on the right track. It was hard for me because he had absolutely nothing for me to work with. Yet, i did not want to turn him away because he was so confused. He did not understand what a thesis was or the difference between summary and analysis. Instead of helping him with his actual paper, I explained to him what the difference between a summary and analysis was and how to construct a thesis. I genuinely think i helped him. He wanted me to google the plot of the story for him and go from there. However, i think teaching him the basics will help him in the long run and he seemed to be happy with the session as well.


Problem 2: Content

Last week I had a student who was a nursing major. She asked me for help on the content of the paper and said she was confident on her grammar and sentence structure. I had literally no idea about her topic (medical assisted suicide). Instead of telling her what information was wrong or right I had her read her paper out loud. We talked about what aspects of the paper were redundant and unnecessary. We talked about we're she may need to have sources to back up her stance. I surprised myself in this session because my immediate thought was that i could not do anything to help this student. Yet, i was able to help her in multiple ways just my reading it with her.


Honestly, i was going to complain about these two situations when i began to write this blog. However, as i was remembering the actual sessions i realize that they we're rewarding and we actually did get something accomplished (even if it wasn't exactly what the student was asking for).


MORAL: Tutoring sessions can take you somewhere you never thought you would go and that can be a beautiful thing.

Self-Sponsored or Creative?

I have to say -- I left our last staff meeting feeling a bit uneasy about the creative writing discussion. This uneasiness, I think, stems from a desire to keep the writing center away from drama. In fact, I do not fault the creative writing faculty if they do not want others infringing on their territory. (And perhaps it is fair to say, as well, that this is speculation at this point.)

I tend to agree with Stephen's point: if we want to know how to better serve creative writers who've chosen to come to the center, maybe we would do well to ask a member of the creative writing faculty to attend one of our meetings or to offer us advice in some other way.

If we want to welcome more creative writers in, then it seems likely that Laurie's idea is quite strong: we could host an hour long "creative writing space" once a week or so.

If the Writing & Rhetoric Department housed the creative writers, then it would probably be a fairly benign exercise to have such a "creative writing hour." However, since English owns creative writing courses, and since there has been (I'm told) tension between these two programs, maybe we would be better off staying away from the phrase "creative writing" altogether.

As some of you adeptly pointed out during our brief discussion, we are to be able to take on any writer at any stage working on any project. We have no particular responsibility to welcome more creative writers than we do to welcome any other subgroup of writers.

However, it is possible that we're using the idea of "creative writing" to fill in for what we really want and what is simply much more difficult to articulate (and this is my extrapolation from our conversing and our blogging) -- more writing-in-general; more varied writing; more varied writers; a less clinical setting; more sessions with things other than academic paper assignments at their center; more space for ourselves to write. If this is the case, I believe there may be other ways -- ways with little potential to spark drama -- for us to get to these related (and arguably better) goals.

If we want to hold an hour for writers producing texts for non-academic reasons, we could call this hour "self-sponsored writing hour in the writing center." During such an hour, students could either bring with them or produce there and then writing they are doing for reasons other than school and other than grades. Tutors could participate in such an hour as well. And while some of this writing may fall in to traditional creative writing genres, some will not.

I've also been thinking about the need to make our space look different from the rest of the AEC. It occured to me last week when two of the computers were taken up by baseball players browsing through their facebook accounts that there is a problem with the fact that the Writing Center does not really appear to be anything other than extra rooms in the AEC. I know we are housed there and that we rely on them, but I think it would be interesting to revamp or space to symbolically reassert our separateness.

These are rough ideas, and I welcome feedback.

Bags of Poems and Telephone Poles

In light of all our creative writing talk during today's meeting...

Have any of you found a little bag full of poems on any telephone poles in Narragansett? If so, you've unknowingly taken part in the Origami Poems Project. This project centers around a unique way of spreading the poetic word(s), so to speak. A number of poets are involved and these strange but surprisingly lovely gems can be found at a number of various locations in 'Gansett - all of which are posted on the website. How interesting!

Event: Read/Write Series

Read/Write Presents: Mary Cappello

When: Wednesday, October 14th 2009 from 4PM-6PM

Where: Hoffman Lounge, Swan Hall, Kingston Campus

URI English professor Mary Cappello will be presenting, discussing and reading from her newly released Called Back, a memoir crafted through the lens of a personal fight with cancer that intensely considers what "breast cancer awareness" truly cultivates awareness of and contemplates the seemingly simplistic phrase "Tell me what you're feeling." Called Back is Mary Cappello's third book; she is also the author of Night Bloom and Awkward: A Detour. A copy of this event's flyer can be found here.

Variance--The Work We Performe

As I have been following the blog, tutoring, and watching others tutor, I have come to notice that the work we engage in a writing center is quite variant. I think Kate's post from this week really encapsulates this phenomena. For this post I'd like to touch on a couple of the sessions I've worked on:

• My First Session: A student arrives who wishes to feedback on creative writing project;
• My Second Session: A student arrives who wants to conduct research for a paper. The student has no experience using with Google, Helin, EbScho, or search engines.
  
• My Third Session: A student arrives who wants assistance with 1) APA References page, 2) In-text citations, 3) Abstracts, 4) Headings.

During S1, I repeatedly tried to focus the student on the text. What did he wish to accomplish? What did he want me to read in particular? Was there a part of the story or an idea that he wanted me to engage. Having some experience with creative writing myself, I know that these texts can be very tied to one's sense of self--we invest ourselves in these pieces of writing. (This is, I think true for all writing, but for some reason creative writing, at times, seems more emotionally loaded.) The student really didn't know what he wanted from me or what he hoped we would accomplish in the session. I came to realize that the student just wanted someone to read the story, and someone to be able to talk to about his ideas. He didn't want or need my insights: he wanted to share his. I think, ultimately, the session enabled him the time and space he desired to be with this text with an audience.

During S2, I found the student really positive and eager to learn. She told me that growing up she hadn't had a computer, and now her family had just gotten one, but she wasn't really sure how and what to do with one. This, for me, was a pretty eye opening experience. With our Iphone, Ipod, Blackberry, digi-net-text-infused lives it's pretty mindbogglingly to meeting someone who isn't familiar with computers. But it does crystallize the wide gap between those that have access to computers and developing computer literacy and those who don't. I explained a bit about Google scholar, how to access the URI library page, and left her at the controls to navigate through the process/internet while I walked her through the process. Then, I asked her to close out and try to do it independently. She successfully found sources, and then because she said she wasn't familiar with the library, and because I still had time to work with her, I offered to walk her over to the library and locate the book sources she was looking for. I think she was kind of surprised to have someone really want to help her and she was really happy that she came to learn how to use the computer (for research) almost independently. Just a little bit of steering advice from me, but she really did the work.

During S3, a student arrived with an APA paper she had written. She was really pretty anti-self about her abilities and very un-confident that she was "doing" APA correctly. We talked about styles, and conventions for a minute, and I tried to bolster her confidence that, in fact, she had done a very good job. Sure there were a few "technical errors" in the references page (a comma missing here a period missing there), but holistically speaking the page accomplished what its purpose and the APA structures were well followed. As we transitioned into working on her citations and the abstract, again, she had that "I'm doing it all wrong" attitude but after showing her what she had done right, I think she got to see that APA is pretty technical and that knowing every nuance isn't necessary. We worked together at finding the parenthetical citation models to follow, and while at times I felt like she was trying to "get me to do it for her" she ended up doing the work. I thought it was a pretty good session all in all, and we spend nearly an hour working together on the paper which was roughly 12 pages long.