Blog #24: Wriitng Center Visit

This has been a crazy week for the Writing Center. We’ve been s busy that all appointments were being set for a week in advance. Most of my students got their appointments early so they were ready to visit their tutor before their time ran out. Students are working on their comparison or contrast essays. I’ve been able to determine through reading blogs, grading essays, and looking at tutor notes, that some students were not honest with their tutors. Several students did not come prepared, but just pretended like they were already working on their essays. Some students acted like they had never sat in our class discussions where we talked about the assignment and how it had to be either comparison or contrast. I don’t know why students do that. It seems kind of silly to me since students can only get as much help from their tutors as they want. If you don’t tell your tutor the whole story, you won’t get the best help you might get. If you don’t tell the tutor the assignment, or give the tutor the full details, the tutor can only help you a little bit. It gets frustrating, at first for me (during the grading period) but ultimately for students (as they learn about their grades).
I just wish I could get students to remember that tutors only know what the student tells them. If the student says oh this is a comparison/contrast essay. The tutor believes that and helps the student write a comparison AND contrast essay. The bad part about that is that this assignment was comparison OR contrast, not both. This has to be very frustrating for students who don’t realize they are heading down the wrong avenue as they attempt to complete their assignment.
Another problem at the center is that I accidently deleted a week’s worth of appointments. Our appointment program was going crazy and only saving appointments for about an hour. We knew we were booked, but we couldn’t tell who took the appointment, what that person’s phone number was/is, or if we had too many people set for that appointment period. Part of it was my fault because in my attempt to fix it, I totally MESSED IT UP! YUCK! We had to revert to no appointments and only accepting walk-ins for a week. ARGH!