On my way to the Commons this afternoon, I tried to analyse my feelings about our mentoring task...just so I could have a clear understanding of myself I guess. I didn't come up with anything concrete, but my overwhelming sense was one of nervousness. I was thinking - how in the world am I going to be able to help this student? I've only had one shadowing experience thus far, and despite all of the discussing, theorising and reading we've done in and for class, I knew actually using all of the skills we talked about would be a different story.
I'm happy to report that everything went so well! I had such a good time talking with my mentee and I am excited to see how her paper develops after our discussion. To break the ice, I did the introductory thing - what's your name? are you originally from VA? do you have siblings? - and answered the same questions about myself. Then I asked her to tell me about the reading she chose and why she picked the person that she wrote her letter to. After listening I read her paper aloud and we got to work.
We discussed a lot of different ways she could improve her paper and I tried hard to focus on larger issues and ideas rather than grammar and sentence structure. My student was open and communicative, which really helped me to see how she was digesting what we were talking about and how I could further guide her. We were a little slow going initially, but when Dr. Gale called for us to stop, I was surprised because we had gotten into such a good groove.
Overall, I'm really pleased with how today went. I do have a comment to make though - Ms. Dolson came over and noted that I was writing the guidance points down myself, rather than having the student do it. I don't really know how I feel about this because I have seen writing centre consultants doing it in the past, but at the same time I can see how you might want the student to write themselves. It is an interesting thing for me to think about. I wonder how other people feel about this?
Q&A Blog Posts
15 years ago
Gabrielle,
ReplyDeleteI hope I didn't undermine you by bringing that up during your session. I apologize.
I think this is a good question to discuss. I think it all depends on what you are writing and why. On the one hand, we do work on writing formal commentary on a paper, but I ususally think of that as being done before a conference as an aid for discussion. I can see where a student writer might be on to a good idea and talking it through out loud and then the consultant could try and capture some notes for the writer. The centeral value that I try to adhere to is that the text belongs to the writer, and not to the consultant, so all the different subtleties--like who has the paper in front of them, and who writes on it, etc.--should point to the writer being the owner of the text. I am interested to hear that you have seen conusltants writing on peoiple's texts. What were they writing? What was the circumstance?
I visited the Writing Centre as a freshman on two different occasions and both times had different consultants. They were just writing down the guidance points that they had given me.
ReplyDelete