Observation Reflection

In first appointment, for a half hour, didn't show up, so I had a chance to just talk to my mentor, Margaret, about her experience with the RWC, working with ESL students, and writing in general.

The second appointment, again for a half hour, didn't show up either, but luckily there was a walk-in. He was a freshman in a composition course, with a paper due on childhood memories. He was dyslexic and shied away from reading the paper aloud himself, so Margaret did. He meant for the paper to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, and so Margaret laughed a lot and pointed out parts that she thought were clever right off the bat so that he felt comfortable. It was a second draft and there wasn't really much to critique. It seemed like he was mostly there because he wasn't sure that he was following through with the assignment correctly, so Margaret just pointed out things she thought were definitely working, a couple of the grammar issues because there wasn't much else to take issue with, and asked him if what she was getting out of the paper was what he was trying to communicate (it was). As we started to run out of time, she just asked for his own synopsis' of the last few paragraphs and if he had any real issues with them.

The third appointment, last half hour, was a girl with a "genre paper". She was also a freshman in one of the composition courses and the first thing she told us about the paper was that it was "so stupid". She was mostly done with the paper, actually over the word limit, but still hadn't written her conclusion. She didn't really want to read the paper out loud, but when Margaret hit really weird spots, like the thesis, she would ask her to read those specific sentences out loud and she would. Margaret pointed out the really strong spots as well, again sort of boosting the writer's confidence and getting her to talk more about her paper and its subject, which she was actually very passionate about (Relay for Life). We spent a good chunk of our time on the thesis statement. The problem was that, given the rubric for the assignment, the writer was trying to use words like "exigence" and "rhetoric" and "discourse", but they really weren't applying in the way she was using them. After she talked it out for a couple of minutes, she sort of teased out a more coherent thesis that she seemed to like a lot better. Because she was over the word count, Margaret would point out where a paragraph "really started for her", and the writer was more than happy to cross out blocks of text, admitting that she felt like they were rambling and not really helping the paper.

Both sessions were really cool, and it was interesting to see how comfortable both of the writers were after they had their confidence bolstered a little bit. Afterwards I asked Margaret about the sessions, like if they were really standard or if she felt that they went well, and she told me that when she first gets a paper in front of her she looks for something to compliment first, rather than something to critique.