11/2 Reflection

Today I had two students plan to come into the RWC, the latter canceled. My earlier appointment was a fourth year student majoring in history. He was in the process of completing a senior capstone paper that needed to be 15-20 pages and cited in Chicago, a format that I was unfamiliar with. I was initially overwhelmed and nervous when I looked at the appointment and saw the length of the paper but he was extremely prepared when he came to the session and that made a world of a difference. His paper focused on student loan debt and how its negative effects are opposite of the goals of capitalism. The student came in with a 15 page polished draft as well as an outline of each paragraph and introduction because the time constraints wouldn't allow us to read his entire assignment. I started out by asking him about what he wanted to address in the session and we moved from there, I think his preparation and my concern to talk about his specific questions helped to combat my initial nervousness.

The student said that he wanted to focus on his comparison between his introduction and conclusion, strengthening his thesis and making sure that his paper does not start to get weaker because of his concern with the page number minimum. I began reading his thesis and having him explain to me the context of his paper. It ended up being a bit redundant and so I made suggestions on where to make his thesis clear and concise, he initially believed because his paper had to be so long that equated to having a lengthy thesis statement. We then workshopped the introduction and talked about the ordering of his ideas: he wanted to focus on the history of student loan debt, the idea of capitalism as an economic theory and how student loan debt is related to moral values. With each of these three tenants , I used them to refer back within his body to make sure that he didn't go off on tangents. By using his outline, it was easy to make sure that the content of his body paragraphs were aligned with his 3 subtopics. Lastly, we revised his conclusion paragraph. Initially, it was composed of small choppy sentences taken from each body paragraph and so we discussed the idea behind a conclusion: "it summarizes the paper and then brings about a new or circumventing idea that encompasses all the previous information." By discussing this and "talking out" what he actually wanted to accomplish in his paper, his revised conclusion was in fact quite different from the original.

Throughout the session I learned to really listen to what the student wants to accomplish, what is their end goal? Also, if a sentence seems cloudy, ask them what they are really trying to say. In this short experience, I learned many students try to make their own thoughts complex in an effort to make them "appropriate for the context of the class," when in reality when they verbalize their actual thoughts first, their ideas come across clearer on paper.