O My O My O My I'm Flustered!

To be honest, I am starting to feel a little bit flustered about the work in class.... perhaps I'm not organized particularly well, or maybe it's because everything seems to be kicking in this week, but for some reason, I am feeling so anxious about the work in our class! I feel like there are so many things to be remembering and thinking about that my brain is going to explode! All of the work is interesting, but I just can't remember to do it all! There's the reading, then the writing an essay about the reading,and then the blogging, the commenting on the blogs, and then the blog papers which I don't understand, then the printing out our classmates papers, thinking about those papers, writing consultations once a week, blogging about those consultations, then there's the digital project looming in the background, and the classmate consultation, the paper about the consultation, and the helping with the college papers... and I'm sure there are a few things I missed, and I just feel like I'm going crazy trying to keep everything in mind! Am I crazy or is anyone else feeling like this?

Also, I'm a little bit confused and frustrated about the digital projects- they seem so interesting, but how are they helpful in terms of being a writing consultant? I can understand interviewing a faculty member and writing a paper about it, but the digital project just seems to be kind of random for the class description of our class and it is stressing me out because I know that I'm going to have a lot of trouble doing it and it's going to be a really big time commitment.

Does anyone have a way to organize everything that seems to be working for them? I am just really feeling lost and a bit out of control in terms of the class and the work and was hoping someone might have a helpful system? Any tips or strategies would be greatly greatly appreciated!

The Epitome of Un-Techsavy

After reading the article about digital stories I really started to think about how using modern technology as a means of expression isn't necessarily fair. I'm not saying that it's not a great thing and a fantastic method of communication for some people, but for my sake and all those who, like myself, lack all sort of technological logic, I hope that other, more traditional forms of expression don't become extinct. Obviously someone who really enjoys and understands computers is going to be more likely to have a great digital story because he or she can fiddle and mess around on the computer much better than the technologically challenged. It might seem like laziness, but sometimes the bare minimum is all I can really do when it comes to computers, because if I try anything else, I end up wiping out my hardrive, losing all my music, and blowing up my laptop. So, just putting this out there, don't be shocked if my digital presentation isn't super cool and full of crazy effects, because lets be honest, im a tech failure!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!!

Essay Shmessay, Let's Talk About Something Else...

This weekend, after massive amounts of coffee, we got to helping our high school students with their college essays. It didn't really go how I had expected- I could tell that she was tired of free writing after having done it all morning...my student definitely didn't want to write during our session. So, instead of writing, we talked... we talked about how hard it is to sit down and start a college essay and the pressure that comes along with the feeling that this one essay is going to determine the course of your life... it's a feeling that I remember quite distinctly from my own college essay writing experience. Once we talked about how it was hard to start writing, I tried to get her to pin down some ideas that she might be interested in exploring for essays, but again, she didn't seem to keen on this either... I could tell she hadn't put that much though into it, and really didn't want to go into details... she felt awkward talking to me, a perfect stranger, about herself and I could tell that she would rather talk about something else. We were told that our job was to get them excited about their idea's, but since my student didn't really want to talk about ideas, I figured that maybe I could try getting her excited about herself and college. I took the pressure off by saying something along the lines of " well, I just met you and I can already tell that you are such a great girl, so I'm sure that your college essay will do a great job of reflecting the person that you are." This is a statement that I was able to honestly make after having met her for just a few minutes. I could tell that she was such a bright girl with so much to offer, but she just didn't know how to go about doing it in front of a perfect stranger. Then I dropped the essay talk and we talked about college and high school and life in general... then, how I had hoped, our conversation started generating some good ideas for essays... she just needed to feel like we weren't talking about pressure filled essays to start talking honestly and openly... once she did that, she was able to see the bigger picture... she was focusing in too much on the essay and forgetting about how great she was and how any school would be lucky to have her! Once she started telling me about herself without the essay cloud over her head, potential essay idea's came out naturally. I find it hard sometimes to strike a balance between paper and personal talk, but I found from my first session, that sometimes personal talk can lead to paper talk while making the client feel confident and comfortable. Maybe sometimes part of being a writing consultant is making an awkward and shy person feel comfortable enough to realize that he or she has plenty to say!

You can e-mail it to me, or we can just sit down and look over it?

One of my deepest fears about being a writing consultant, is that it just wont work- that I won't be able to actually help anyone...

However, today I was hanging out with my roommate, jamming out to some tunes when she asked me if I could help her with her paper... she knew what she wanted to say, but just wasn't really sure how to go about saying it... I thought about our reading and what we've been talking about in class, so we turned off the tunes and I sort of asked her to just talk out her idea to me... to explain what she was thinking in the context of the novel, and how she thought it would help her argument... much to my surprise, it worked out really well... together we found just the right way to put words to her ideas! Afterwards, once she had finished we sat down together and went over the whole paper... usually she just prints them out, I write all over them, give them back to her, and she fixes them, but in the spirit of the writing center, I thought that we should practice our collaboration... so together, we collaborated... I felt a strange yet satisfying feeling when she said " wow, doing this together is so much better than you just correcting my papers.. I actually understand what you're fixing and I feel like it's gonna help me be a better writer." I didn't actually think that people made comments like that... I figured it was one of those things that the writing center made up and quoted their clients saying to make it look good, but I was wrong... today, for the first time, I really took a step towards learning how to collaboratively help someone with their papers in a face to face setting, and it actually worked... I really hope that she gets an A on her paper... if she doesn't do well, I'll have to take back what I just said and I'll feel like a total idiot- but I know she'll do well because she's such a smart cookie!

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

Gyra

Remember the 5 paragraph essay?

Hope everyone had a great weekend! There was a lot of reading, but I wanted to focus on the the differences between college and high school writing- I thought the story about the two very different first year college students was really interesting and it took me on a little walk down memory lane...

As I was doing the reading from The Transition to College Writing, I naturally couldn't help but to think about my own transition in writing from an awkward high schooler to a quirkily developed junior in college. I decided to look for an old high school paper to read on my computer and see how much had really changed in the past 3 years.... I realized that my writing hadn't really gotten that much better, but it just somehow sounded really different. I couldn't really figure out what had changed- I was still sticking to the basic intro, body, conclusion format, and still going about the writing process in the same way that I did in high school, but something about my writers voice seemed to have changed after my first year of college. Then, I think I figured out what it was. I think that one of the things that college writing does, especially if you find yourself taking a lot of humanities classes, is it lets you experiment with your style through more non-traditional, less pressure filled situations. This blog for example, or short opinion reading responses or those annoying 2 page writing responses that you turn in on blackboard- I used to think that this kind of" psuedo academic writing" was a waste of time... what could it possibly do to help get me an A on the typical 6 to 8 page paper? But then I realized that it can do alot in terms of developing an idividual voice and striking a balance between who you are as a person and what your paper needs to be as a student writer. I found that my college papers, especially after taking my first class that required reading responses, seemed so much less mechanical and more like a reflection of my own voice. For me, experimenting with less structured ways of writing showed me how I really wanted to write but usually couldn't for the fear of academic retribution. I can't speak for every high school, but at least at mine, we never had that opportunity. It was either a 5 paragraph essay or a creative writing piece... it was never a bit of both, and for me, that was the biggest transition into college writing. Learning how to write an academic paper that is a working relationship between educational information and individual voice is something that I could never accomplish in high school... there was never a simultaneous combination of opinion and information, it was always just information... guess i needed college to build on the opinion part...

Hope that everyone has a lovely week!

-Gyra