How am I doing in this class?

I have to admit I don't think I'm doing very well in this class. I'm the type of person who likes due dates from the start of the semester, I stink at writing blog posts on a regular basis (as you can probably tell), and I'm more of a note taker than speaker in class. I think I've done well on all the assignments that I have turned in thus far, but I am concerned with my over all grade. I do think I did very well on my article review and digital story (even though I talked a little fast in my recording) so hopefully that will make up for some of my lackings. I have although very much enjoyed all of our out of class experiences, which I thought I was going to dread (in the fact that I always seem to never know when they are lol).

My favorite part of this class I think I would say is working with the ESL students on their college essays. It was fun working with a student you can have a real conversation with and I felt like I did a lot of good by helping them with their essays. I hope my students get into their first choice schools, both of them had some very big dreams. I hope that they can achieve them to the fullest extent.

Boys & Girls Club (first visit)

I have to admit I was slightly disappointed with my first visit to the Boys & Girls Club. Long and I had two different children during are time at the center, both were good kids but neither had any work done on their Digital Story project. Our second student did in fact have someone in mind to interview, so that was a slight improvement then the first boy we were assigned but who had to leave. I guess its hard to have kids do assignments done for something other than school work since their are no repercussions.

I was slightly horrified in the fact that neither of our students had any idea on the basic questions to interview a person in order to get a sense of who they are. The only question that the students both came up with was "what year were you born?" besides that it was like pulling teeth in order to help them discover how to interview someone.

I know they are just middle school/junior high students but I guess I just expected a little more enthusiasm to be doing this project or at least a little more conversation. Maybe it was intimidating to have two college students looming over them and asking a whole bunch of questions that they did not have answers to yet. Maybe next time their teachers/counselors/whoever there overseers are will have them slightly more prepared.

This will not be me...

This cartoon is by Dave Walker. From http://www.weblogcartoons.com/

Only other writing center appointment this 2nd half of the semester...

So I only managed to get in two writing center appointments since our last blog paper. I'm disappointed in the fact of how many students don't bother to cancel their appointments and let their consultants know they aren't coming. But any experience is good experience I guess.

Anyways my 2nd writing center appointment was with a student who had great example from their book they had to read but not knowing how to correlate it into the topics given to them by their professor. I wasn't familiar with the book but thank goodness my consultant had read it in high school once.

The student had good examples from the book but as my consultant and I discussed them further with the student we decided that there was just too many of them. Sometimes students just over use examples from their texts, and this was the case for this student. We decided less was better than more, so we had the student pick out the examples that he thought really played a key part to the book and to work off those. After eliminating about two thirds of the examples I think the student was finally able to grasp how he was going to go about his paper. We brainstormed for the rest of the appointment, letting him take the lead in the discussion so he could find out for himself he really did know all along what he wanted to write about.

Writing Center Shadow--better late than never

Well I have been unfortunate in my shadowing at the Writing Center. So far since my last posting nearly ALL of my tutors appointments have been canceled. I was however able to meet up with her at different times in order to get some more shadowing under my belt.

My writing tutor and I meet up with one student the other day who had no idea entirely how to go about picking a topic for her paper. She was writing a CORE paper on "Brave New World," and for any one who has read it before you know that you can write just about on any topic from that book, so I can see why she was having a hard time narrowing down the topics. After discussing with her sometime on the VERY brief guidelines of the paper we were able to narrow it down to medicine correlations in "Brave New World" and medications in today's day in age. It was actaully pretty interesting when we started discussing the correlations and connections.

This section just really highlighted for me how a student can come in no matter what stage they are in to come into the writing center. This female student had nothing written what so ever, only with her book and brief instructions. And from that we brainstormed ideas and got her inspired to write on a topic that she was interested in. Go us! :)

What have I learned thru my bloging?

As I'm reading through my blog posts I'm wondering if I have learned anything. This class has seemed almost effortless with the material because it seems almost common sense. So have I learned to be a writing consultant? Am I at the point where I can honestly say that through blogging I have learned ...... I just don't know. To me it seems that I have these past couple weeks just writing typing out what was in my head at the time, not really thinking how they all connect together. But do my blogs have a common think besides just being for the same class?

I know I have intentionally written on my dream of becoming a teacher and what I hope this class will provide me in my future classroom. Is that the connection I need to talk about in my blog paper? Or is there something deeper that I have yet to discover? I hope I find the answer soon, since I am running out of time.

Response to "The Concept of Control in Teacher Response..."

In this article I found a quote that I think both relates to this English 383 class and my education class backgrounds:

"The teacher's proper role, [Joseph Moxley] explains, 'is not to tell the student explicitly what to do but rather to serve as a sounding board enabling the writer to see confusions in the text and encouraging the writer to explore alternatives that he or she may not have considered.'" (224)

Unlike the other article we read, "The Genre of the End Comment," which I found to disregard encouraging remarks made by teachers, stating they were part of a generic convention and not of sincere intentions. I find that this quote serves to better describe the teachers role in paper reading than the other article which I thought stated teachers were under educated on grading papers.