A Measure of Success

A student who has come in regular intervals over the past few semesters shows up. We each say hey, and he take off his hat and looks at the crown. See, I tease him about wearing Yankee hats. We have a no-Yankee hat policy in the Learning Center*, but he was sporting the Sox (White, not Red) logo, so he was safe. I pointed out that he didn't even know what hat he was wearing today, and we laughed about that.

The hat policy wasn't all he was learning about. Later, after he filled me in on his assignment, a summary of the movie In the Bedroom, he was running through the basic ideas of the story. The class is writing about revenge, and he got to the part in the story when one of the characters wants to take revenge because he got "angry and stuff like that."

The student stopped and said, "No, 'not stuff like that.' He was angry." Then he continued. I felt awesome right then**. I didn't say anything about his use of such a vague phrase. It was like he took a giant pen and scratched a line through what he just said***.

That was cool. That made my morning.

*I find stuff like this helpful to disarm a place like this. It would be easy for a Writing Lab to feel like a nerdcave, academically isolated and only focused on papers papers papers. When we create faux policies like not allowing Yankee hats or requiring people who do math in the writing area to bring us donuts, we poke fun at the institutional nature of the place, show an awareness of the outside world (those Yankee hats never have to do with papers) and show a little humanity (donuts = hungry). Everything is strategic around here, even disdain for that NY logo that shows up on the heads of so many students who can't name their Yankees.

**It only had a little bit to do with the fact that I find myself doing this automatically when I hear words. I don't tell people when I do it. That's rude. I always tell people who ask if I'm going to correct their grammar that I have a policy of not correcting people's grammar out in the real world because people who do that don't have any friends.

**"...angry and stuff like that..."

Tell the Truth

Yesterday, a student working on a process paragraph showed me her work. It was about how she planned to study for her first math test. I asked her about one of the steps, the one where she comes into the Learning Center to work with a tutor. Specifically, I asked her what she did with the tutor.

She told me she didn't actually come in, that she planned to do that, but didn't make it because of her schedule. I advised her as I always advise people in this situation: Tell the truth.

I asked about details when she had none. I told her that telling the truth bases your paper on facts that can be used for evidence when necessary, when someone like, say, a Writing tutor asks for more detail. I informed her that her teacher might ask her about it and she might end up not being able to answer her teacher, which is not a good thing.

For some reason, sometimes people come to me for advice, but elect not to take it*.

She left the imaginary meeting with a tutor in her paragraph and emailed it to her teacher. Her teacher's reply said that she did not have enough detail in the section where she discusses visiting the tutor. The teacher would like more details from a meeting that never happened.

Tell the truth!

*Like the guy who is just now taking my advice to move on to drafting his second paragraph--he already told me what it's going to be about--instead of spending the rest of the morning tinkering with his first paragraph. He's already spent a good hour on it, and I told him more than once to move on and get the rest of the paper drafted.