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.