Maybe its because it's already been drilled into our heads that one of the main purposes of tutoring is teamwork and idea exchange, or maybe its because I assume to understand too much, but either way, my first reaction to Lunsford's essay was "Well, duh!" There was no other word fo rthe feeling that she was just filling up a few pages with a discovery that I had already made on the first day of class. Maybe I'm missing her point, but I feel like we as students-soon-to-be-tutors are already aware that collaboration is a necessity in the writing center. How can you help a client without the exchange of ideas or the validation of their ability to communicate? It takes two contributing people making an exchange, or having a discussion, and to me, that best defines collaboration. How can we tutor any other way? It seems that one of the afore-mentioned ideas drilled into our heads, the client-tutor realtionship, is the one we have focused on the most so far, and Lunsford's "Center as a Storeroom" or "as Garret" is what we have been advised against doing the entire time. Her Storeroom and Garret are good examples of the tutor as Dictator in the writing room hierarchy, while I think that collaboration promotes a kind of equality. Lunsford begins to claify all this towards the end of her essay, but I still feel like I'm missing a central idea. I'm confused by her simultaneous advocation for, and warning against collaboration. The piece is written more like a speech than an essay, I think.
On a completely un-related, petty-me note, I think Lunsford is full of herself and needs to tone down the unnecessary self-promotion in order to better get her point across without causing the animosity of the reader (like me).
I am starting to believe that the purpose of this book is to confuse us, and its working on me. I know I should stop looking at the book as a guide, but its habit. After having just been lectured to avoid being too authorative, too 'powerful' in the writing room, now we have Brooks teling us that we should basically become another teacher. Develop the studen't writing thoughts and ideas, don't worry aobut the grammar. But this totally contradicts his example at the start of the essay in which everyone comes away happy and satisfied. If the PROFESSOR gave the student a good grade, then it was obviously up to their standard of writing, and who are we to change that? I am starting to sound like the anti-tutor, I think. Something isn't right here.
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Maybe being an "anti-tutor" isn't a bad thing. What I mean is, I think you're reacting to the fact that tutoring isn't a clear-cut set of "techniques"; it's a delicate balance between doing too much and doing too little for each client. If you're looking at class as me trying to drill something into your head, you're misunderstanding my approach. I'm trying to expose you to a range of ideas about how tutors and writing centers work - there is no single, correct way, anymore than there is a single, correct way to write, to read, or to teach - and to balance our discussions in class with lessons I've learned from working and researching in writing centers. In other words, I do believe in "best practices" (and just editing a student's paper isn't among those), but I'm not trying to shove one ideology of tutoring or another down your throat. I want you to experience these different ideas, these different perspectives, in the readings, because they really are out there - you really will find people advocating strongly for these different tutoring methods. The best way for you to become a good tutor is to explore those different perspectives and figure out where you stand.
ReplyDeleteBeing an anti-tutor may help you with that. Read against the grain; tutor against the grain; challenge what I present so neatly in class; question the ideas on your blog. It's healthy to be non-conformist. It's healthy to question. And hey, if we assume a collaborationist stance toward learning, we can say that there's no possible way for learning to be simple or easy or anything other than hard and confusing, because we're not "finding" knowledge, we're making it.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of emphasis on what is seemingly common sense. However, I think the purpose of the essay is to keep tutors-to-be from falling into the conventional misconception of writing centers. What all of this talk about collaboration says to me is that we must strive to develop a more personal relationship that exists between teachers and students.
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