Blog #15: Reflect on Your Writing Center Experience

The Writing Center has been very busy recently. In fact, in order for a student to get a Writing Center appointment, he or she has had to schedule his appointment 2 weeks in advance. The good news is that the Writing Center now has 3 new tutors! Their presence has helped reduce the stress that students were under. We have also extended the Writing Center’s hours. Starting this week, the Writing Center will be opened until 7:30 on Monday and Thursdays. This should help those students who have a difficult time getting to campus during the day, but could have an evening appointment.

In my classes, I require that my students take their essays to the Writing Center before they turn in their final drafts. I have already read and graded the essays that were taken to the Writing Center. Overall, I found that many of my students did not tell the Writing Center tutor what the assignment was. Apparently, they told the tutor that the assignment was a descriptive essay, but the student did not provide the tutor with the written instructions. This was problematic in a variety of ways. I can’t really blame the student or the tutor individually because the problem resulted because neither of them followed basic instructions.

If the student would have provided the written instructions (which are available online AND the student should have a printed copy too), the tutor would have understood that this essay was also a narrative, meaning that it should have basically told a story. On the other hand, if the tutor would have ASKED for the instructions and READ them, he or she would have realized that the introductory and conclusion paragraphs were the beginning and ending of the ‘story’. I would like to blame the tutor, and so would my students who were affected by this misunderstanding, but ultimately I can’t. This was a great lesson for the student. As I reminded the student, the tutor was not in the student’s class, the tutor did not hear the student’s teacher tell him or her over and over again (over lots of days) what the assignment is and how to accomplish it, and the tutor did not participate in the building of a timeline with the student. The tutor can only help the student with the information that is provided to him or her. Ultimately, the student has to take SOME control over the tutorial session.

There were two other things I found to be very interesting about some tutorial sessions. First, many students received EXCELLENT advice from their tutors, but the students simply did not take the advice. Some students just went to the Writing Center, had their session with a tutor, and did nothing with the information that was provided to them. Those students were hit pretty badly on their grades because they were far TOO passive. The second interesting thing I saw was that a number of students set appointments with their tutors to help them build a timeline. While that was fine, a good number of those students would have benefited from a second tutoring visit where the tutor and the student reviewed a more developed draft. Students who could have benefited from the second visit tended to have OBVIOUS sentence structure issues and OBVIOUS revision problems.