How about the UNtraditional?

This could just be a personal tic, but after reading about traditional vs. non-traditional students in the university, I think that there should be another "traditional"-based word thrown in as well: the UNtraditional student. Who I mean is those that are traditional in the sense that they are students of the right age, attended college at the appropriate time, but just don't have the same experiences that the majority of students do, like teenage mothers, students who didn't go to school in the states, or even homeschooled students. None of these students had school experiences like everyone else, and even though this doesn't seem like such a big deal, it can still greatly affect their participation in and attitude about college. Then again, maybe I'm trying to be too specific and divide too much. If this is the case, then it looks like I should have to divide the international students from the traditional, and then the 'young mothers' from everyone else. This could get sticky, so I'm going to retract everything and chalk this blog up to the need to ramble.

OWLS in the Writer's Room makes me feel like Harry Potter

Sorry, I had to reference Harry Potter; there was no way that anyone who has read the books could look at the word OWLS without thinking of Ordinary Wizarding Levels. I'm done now.
After my experience with the OWL posts in the Writers room, I have determined that they are more trouble than they are worth. Stephen had a very strong, valid point whwen he made the comment along the lines of "This close to finals week, sending in your paper isn't good enough. If you really cared about it then you would find the time and make the effort to meet with a tutor face to face." I couldn't agree more, and not only because of the impending finals week. I think that this applies to all OWL writing. I mean to say that I'm glad we offer an alternative method of collaboration and tutoring aside from having to physically meet with a tutor, but at the same time, when a student sends a paper in via email, I can't help but wonder how serious they really are about it. Even a phone call would be more personal than the email, especially in our internet-centric culture today, where we are highly aware that so much emotion is lost in the text.

Text vs Writing

Sigh. Not to be the stereotypical anti-tutor, but it seems like we've already had the same arguments about writers vs. texts, and I'm pretty sure the jury is still out on that one (is that a colloquialism?). Thats because there is no right judgement, only a right tutee and a right time, as Ortoleva states. I don't think he did an awful job of 'meditiating' on this movement from text to writer or vice versa, nor do I have any complaints about how he writes. I liked how he observed that when a tutor works with a student from a completely different discipline, they are almost forced to focus more on the writer, since they can't really understand the writing.
Personally, I've had an experience with sucha student; he was a biology major, and I'm..not. His paper was about some kind of germ that is found in the roots of some kind of species of goldenrod and radish. Totally bizzarre, and I only understood every other word int he paper. On top of all the confusion about WHAT the paper was about, the structure of the paper was different! Who knew the other departments wrote differently?? Apparently this paper was written in a 'lab' format, where only scientific material and fact could be presented. No opinion, no flowery words, no metaphor..what the heck? This wasn't writing! It was robotic regurgitation of boring ideas, right? Not so much. after 15 minutes of having the writer explain to me what it was we were doing, and how I could help him, I was ready to let him be the tutor. We finally came to an understandign, and the rest of the session went fairly smoothly. Turns out he really only needed emotional support. Anyways, we ended up focusing more on him and his interpretation and how he presented the facts rather than the paper itsself, and so that's how I had my first text-centered tutoring session.

My Way

Growing up in two very different cultures was hard. I always had to balance out one custom with another, one language at a time, trying not to lean too much towards one for fear that it would make me stand out in the other, but through all the juggling acts, I am pretty thankful that I didn't have to juggle writing styles or writing preferences. I never had enough experience with Arabic writing to decide if this was how I should write as opposed to western writnig/ When we watched Writing Across Borders, I could understand and agree with the ESL students' concerns with English writing, but at the same time, I can't write any other way. I think that maybe they were making too broad a generalization when it came to American writing. The examples they gave as 'writing' all had to do with personal experience writing; they said that when they would tell a story, depending on the culture, it would be told in different ways: circular, vaugely, extensivelymetaphorical. But they claimed that the way we wrote our stories was blunt, to the point and was a take-the-reader-by-the-hand type of story telling. I can agree with this, but not that ALL our writing is expected to be liek this. On the contrary, some of our 'greatest' novels are hard to understand and rely on interpretation and analysis to get tehir point across. I can't think of any specific exapmles right now, but let me know if you have one.
Anyway, my culutral preference is to write with a mix of all cultures, depending on the prompt, or on how I want to convey a certain story. I know I would probably never be able to write like the Korean, with their roundabout, vague, comparative prose, basically because I couldn't begin to think in those terms. But I could, and do, tell stories like the Ecuadorian student, who had to explain the entire background of an event before she even said what the event was. This is how I tell stories. It takes patience on behalf of the listener, but everything makes sense in the end. I'm ramble, and I think that comes from the Arab side, where social activity is such a big part of the culture that of course you have to tell three stories in one in order to properly set the scene for what story you were really meaning to tell.
I have yet to have a tutoring session with an ESL student, so I can't speak from experience, but I can predict what I would do if I noticed the difference in their writing. I would probably try to relate to their preference, and depending on the degree of difference, I might suggest tehy phrase the sentence in another way. It all depends on the difference, and from that I think I would choose whatever approach best works for the situation and writing. I don't think that just because writing is different its automatically wrong, and I would try to best preserve the author's voice and style as well as I can without the entire paper being incorrect.

Reflection on Reflection

I'm glad we had to put in Observation time. It not only gave me a chance to learn how the Writer's Room worked, but it also helped me get to know the tutors, learn how they did things, and then compare it to what we're learning in class. (We win, hands down) Now I appreciate that we've had to read a bunch of essays and blog and blog and blog, because its made me more confident as a tutor. I feel like our entire class is pretty much armed with the same weapons, while other tutors aren't. I'm not criticising their tutoring ablilies or methods, but I did note how differently they approached clients, which was the main theme of my Analysis. I think the best thing about Observation was that it helped break my preconceived expectations of what a tutor is and how they are supposed to act. The Analysis helped me realize this, because as I was writing it, I kept coming back to the idea that "Joe should've done this.." or "Helga didn't do that..." when really, it didn't matter what they did or did not do as tutors because whatever they did do accomplished what they meant to. Does that make sense? The main thing is that they were both good tutors, in my opinion, and that neither of them followed a strict Tutor Code, but they both ended up with happy clients. And I guess that's all we can hope to acheive.

Here Comes the Iron Maiden!

When putting our supertutor together, I think our group kept it real. We chose things that were realisitic and practical when tutoring. Patience, Lots of writing strategies, strong writing skills, understanding of the writing process, and knowledge of grammar. All of these abilities should pretty much cover anything that comes our way in the Writing Center. Really, what other skills could we need? The iron Maiden has pretty much the entire English language covered, AND a sense of humor to boot.

Free to Be You and Me?

I'm glad that we're finally discussing reality in the writing room, and by that I mean: a situation we might actually run into when tutoring, unlike the other theories we've been reading. I mean no offense by this, I'm just excited to be discussing a controversial topic.
I do think that its better for the tutors to act as mild censors, becasue we can interact with the clients on a student-peer level. We have no more power than they do, but at the same time we are supposed to be representatives of the university, and are backed up by our training. To me, it seems like the student would be more inclined to pay attention to what we have to say rather than a professor, or the students in the classroom because there's always the suspicion that your peers in the classroom are just performing for the professor's approval. This way, its just one-on-one with you and the client, and I think this is the best possible environment for this sort of confrontation. I think the only 'censoring' duty that we have is to present the client with options: he/she can either develop a better defense of their opinion, or they can be told that their opinion may be met with a less-than-enthusiastic response, and either way their freedom of expression isn't being infringed upon.