A Personal First in the WCenter: A Teary-Eyed Tutee

I had plenty of jokes last semester about how I'd never be able to effectively handle a crying writer in the WCenter; yesterday's 3:00PM appointment proved me wrong. Wholly out of necessity (and a general sense of been-there-too-female-kinship) I confronted my fear of crying tutees.
I shipped out to reception to meet my tutee, a freshman girl working on her arguable claim paper. When I walked in, she was sitting very still with black-blue card in hand, staring at the floor - undoubtedly, something was up. Not wanting to make her uncomfortable, I introduced myself in my most up-beat voice and shook her hand. We walked back to the center, where she told me she was concerned her evidence wasn't strong enough (only personal accounts) to support her overall claim (URI should not cram 3 students into 2-person dorm rooms). She was also concerned she was not going to meet the five page length requirement. During her summary of concerns, I was compiling a list of new evidence she could explore - but did not want to overload her with suggestions. Therefore, I asked when her due date was ("tomorrow") and what she had planned for tonight.
And so it happened: as she informed me she had a soccer game but wasn't going to go... she broke down in tears. She continued on, explaining that her boyfriend had called her while she was sitting in reception and dumped her. It was heartbreaking!
What happened next I was wholly unprepared for: ...I didn't freak. Nor did I stutter, become wildly uncomfortable, or run for the hills as I've jokingly predicted during Wednesday meetings. Instead, I offered her a cup of tea (she declined) and said: "Well, I have a few neat suggestions for new evidence for your claim - how do you feel about getting right into this paper as a distraction from him for the evening?" She loved the idea and we got to work.
She ended up searching for psychological studies regarding the "trio-is-detrimental" theory and ultimately interviewed me (I once lived in a triple on campus) as another piece of evidence. After hitting the Longman for how to cite an interview, Sarah and Katie arrived and she also discussed her evidence with them - Katie provided some particularly helpful evidence in her interview.
I was particularly happy Sarah and Katie came in when they did; my tutee had just finished telling me how her two roommates don't like her, and now her boyfriend dumps her out of the blue via telephone - she couldn't catch a break! I think the collective, "team-work" vibe Sarah, Katie and I achieved was really productive for the tutee, not only as a writer but as a student trying to make it through her first semester.

WRT 383 Project 1

So I've been in contact with Claudine from the RIC Writing Center the past few days, and I've arranged a time to go observe one of the tutors there in a couple of weeks. Two points:

1. I don't have a car, so if someone would like to tag along with me who does, that would be great. I'm supposed to go Monday October 19th at 12 p.m. If you do want to go then, just make sure you mention it to Claudine...

2. I mentioned in my last email to her that several other people will probably be contacting her soon, so she said she'll talk to her tutors and see what other times she can fit us in.

That said, do any of you have specific ideas you will be looking for when you go to observe, or are you just going to watch and then see what develops? Would you rather watch one tutor several times to see how they adapt to different situations or watch a couple tutors once each to see different styles?

Creative Writing & The Writing Center (OR: CW in the WC)

Jeremiah's discussion about fixing prose errors jump-started my thinking wheels today:

Since I began tutoring in the WCenter last spring, I've been asked a countless number of times whether or not creative writing projects are appropriate texts to bring to tutors on the 4th floor. For a while, I didn't know how to answer: I knew a few of tutors that had felt blindsided by a student with a prose poem or piece of short fiction and didn't want to encourage this uncomfortable situation - and, in turn, didn't encourage the creative writer.
Tutors can rightly feel a little off-kilter when a tutee comes in with a creative text; we each have a genre of two that makes us feel less-than-at-ease when it hits the tutoring table. I imagine a piece of fiction feels for some the same way I feel when a graduate Chemical Engineering student comes into a session with a lab report and tons of detailed diagrams. This uneasiness or unfamiliarity with creative texts/sessions is justified even more by the wide range of genres classified under "creative writing:" From poetry, to prose poetry, to fiction, to creative non-fiction, to song lyrics, to vignettes, to novel chapters, to short stories, to the Avaunt Gard I won't even attempt to classify -- who can keep up with it all?
The fact of the matter is no one is expected to know it all, but just as we proudly possess a working understanding of MLA, APA and Chicago style or have a general sense for what a lab report is 'supposed' to look like, we as tutors may want to expand a bit more and gather a general, working knowledge of the popular creative writing genres. I know this may seem daunting - it certainly does to me, but I feel we owe it to this wide base of URI writers to give it a shot. To visually imagine this shift into CW, envision a ven-diagram with circles representing each of the types of writing we tutor frequently (WRT1-- papers, business writing texts, communications and psych papers, nursing reports). Now picture another circle entering the over-lapping mix - one representative of just yet another realm of writing we'll have basic understanding of (CW). This circle may, say, be faded in color to represent that we don't encounter it as frequently as we do other types of texts - but nevertheless it has a place in the diagram.
Furthermore, I know many of the tutors in the center this semester are personally interested in creative writing, so I feel this may be the URIWCenter's kairotic moment to broaden our joint, WCenter horizon. Of course, partaking in the any of the creative writing discourse communities personally and tutoring a writer from one - even if you're completely familiar with it - are definitely two different things. Sure, an understanding of poetry is definitely going to help a tutor out during a session with a poet - but writing/reading poetry and tutoring a poet are separate endeavors, just as writing an essay and tutoring a student about writing an essay are not identical situations. Like with any writing, the creative writer's process may differ from yours, his or her personal belief about the art may be diametrically opposed to your own, etc. In short: Tutoring creative writing will definitely be eased/facilitated by one's prior knowledge of the subject, but either way we're definitely going to need some outside advice to really get into this successfully.
It is here that things get tricky. I've been researching for a better part of this afternoon and can report with confidence (and disappointment) that there is little scholarship regarding creative writing and writing centers. I did discover that many centers that frequently tutoring writing have a separate Creative Writing Center - schools including Middlebury and Umass conduct business in this manner. I personally do not favor this approach; I like the idea of a WCenter that tackles it all - to the best of their ability. I believe this atmosphere creates a great cohesion - a center that is working to work together with others to discover the answers that do not come easily to them. I also discovered some minimal scholarship, including a powerpoint presentation regarding the topic from Purdue and a large case study documenting tutors' feelings regarding creative writing entitled Tutor Attitudes Towards Tutoring Creative Writing in Writing Centers. Neither of the texts answer all of my questions about tutoring creative writing, nor do they raise any other particularly exciting ones. Nevertheless, they are worth a glance. (Note: The second article is super-tutor based in its findings, fyi.)
I will keep researching this topic in the future. I'm curious how you guys feel about getting a little cozier and intimate with creative writing - please comment and let me know! I know there are plenty of URI creative writers who would be thrilled to know they have a place to get some advice on their work.

First Week

I had my first week of tutoring this week. It was a little nerve-wracking at first. There's definitely something to be said about fostering a writing community in the writing center, especially since I've found I have a lot of free time to do work and get to know other tutors. I've only had 2 appointments so far, and 1 unofficial appointment helping Amanda. My first tutee came into the writing center with very little work done and with little understanding of the assignment. I soon realized that I barely understood the assignment either. Rather than accept the poor prompt and move on to the girl's writing, I was stuck with the vague-ness of the assignment sheet. It made me mad because if I don't understand the assignment, how can I help someone write a paper for it? I did the best I could, though, and stressed that she e-mail me when she had more done with the paper - which she did the next night.

With the session I helped Amanda with, I can see why EWC has a chapter about time in it. It is so easy to go over time because you want to make sure that a tutee has a good experience and walks away believing that we have helped their writing rather than wasted their time. Amanda and I spend 50 minutes with the girl, something we could only do because we didn't have any other appointments. I think it will be hard for me to just stop a session only because 30 minutes is up--especially if the session doesn't naturally come to an end at this time.

A First First

I had my first tutee on Tuesday! I celebrated, as advised, but with a peanut butter milkshake and, as I sipped, I thought about the flutter of the butterflies in my stomach in the first few minutes of the session. It made me think of trickster (and I am deliberately not capitalizing the term) and of the openness of those few first moments before perceptions begin to solidify into recognitions. All seemed so open to possibilities. And then, I started reading, and trying to make sense of a text as rapidly as possible, and worrying a bit about the time, about whether it was going to be well spent and how much of it there was, and ... You get the idea. I would like to be at the point at which my internal time measuring device is capable of indicating how far into a session I am, which will probably happen at some point. I would like to be "there" because I would like to keep that fluttering openness, that being on the verge of something, sort of suspended between all of my (self?) (knowledge?) (expertise?) and the unknown (for lack of a more precise term), a non-space of unactivated assumptions. All of this is to say that I enjoyed this first encounter very much, that it contextualized trickster, that it incited a desire for experimentation. Of course, I suspect that the student's level of writing command, which was rather high, contributed in one way or another. But even that, at some point, I think and hope to be right, might not be of consequence. Either way, I thought I should share this first moment with you, a moment the intensity of which continues to reverberate, as you can see, two days later.

Reflections on the first week...

I was hoping to actually post this to the blog yesterday during my session, but I have been having a simply awful time trying to connect to the internet (anyone else having problems/issues with laptop connections?). It actually interfered with my last session a bit, as the tutee had all of his potential online sources for an argumentative essay saved in his bookmarks and it took him 10 minutes to be able to connect and access. This semester I have simply been plagued by technology problems!

So I have had a really great first week of tutoring! My first tutee of the semester came in with a draft of his literacy narrative for WRT 104 and it happened to be about a very positive experience he had with one of the writing tutors last year. Since he was lacking some vivid details, I took advantage of actually being in the space where his narrative occurred and pushed him to describe the WC, what resources we had, the feeling he gets from the physical space, and even the elevator ride up to reception. He looked at me like I was crazy for asking him what he heard in the center and tried to wiggle out of it with a gruff “nothing” but the clickety-clack of computer keys and the hum of our always present window fan just made me more persistent.

I also have had one repeat customer over the past 2 days. I always like return customers because you can actually establish a routine and get to know their individual process in that you can’t predict with newbies. I was also thinking about how return customers really play a role in the WC community. Sure, we are a community of tutors, of writers, of peers, but for those tutees who keep coming back to the center, such as the young man who wrote his literacy narrative about his first visit to the WC and this new repeat customer, we are also building a type of community. For some, we may just be a service (god-forbid an editing service!) but for those who keep coming back we are a part of their lives and a part of their support system here at URI.

The "D" Word or "Diversity"

As you all know, tomorrow is the meeting date we've chosen to dedicate to discussions on diversity. This is a particularly difficult topic for our community to discuss. In fact, it is an amorphous and messy thing for any group to take up.

One of the issues that "diversity" raises as a topic is, ironically, that it is far more than merely topic-al. It implies, in other words, that there are things that are to do with difference and other things that are exempt -- they do not fall in line under that particular topic.
We might even recall a related, pervasive, and rather peculiar assumption in a variety of academic and extracurricular or even private settings: diversity means raceclassgender in general and blackpoorgay specifically. I suppose we all recognize the conflation going on in these instances. Perhaps this sentiment is to blame for smart people with good intentions offering up ideas on diversity that are of the "how I will accept and help those others" variety.
However, can any one or any thing or any place or any time really opt out of diversity? Can any piece of the material world say that it is a starting point? Can we simply claim a neutral space where diversity is a non-issue because we do not, for example, have any people with visible marks of being other than mainstream? And how do we define mainstream, anyway?
A related matter: at times, one might hear something like, “I’m sensitive to issues of diversity,” or “issues of diversity interests me,” or “I’m interested in increasing the diversity of our staff.” These are loaded and highly problematic statements to be sure. And though it is difficult to admit, these are among the very best of the statements I’ve heard on diversity. They stand in due to a lack of a better something else.
I want to suggest here that diversity is the term we ought to use to draw attention to heterogeneity over and against originality. We are not all the same, and this is not very profound or surprising. However, living in a late capitalist age in which narcissistic expressionism appear to be the dominant mode, I suppose we feel the need to devote meetings to diversity in order to offer space to reflect on the ways we are different and not ways in which we are better. We are special, maybe, but not all that remarkable. There are things we owe to each other and yet nothing is really owed to any one of us. There is no clean line that separates me from you from they, but there is difference nonetheless. Our work as tutors should linger in the tension of this impossibility – in a space where it becomes possible to live differently. I think the McIntosh reading is, therefore, appropriate not because it brings up issues of race and racism. This ought not to be the meeting where we only admit or deny our privileges, though that could be nice. Instead, I find value in McIntosh’s implicit call for more humility, more understanding, more thoughtfulness, and more love – these things all require less ego and more responsibility.
I tend to believe that we are highly diverse from day-to-day; our identities, I’d say, are complicated and inconsistent performances. If we are giving our attention to diversity, we are honoring the ways in which we cannot entirely know ourselves or others; we are allowing for ellipses that go un-interpreted; we are giving our selves and others space to perform without judgment…