Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Wrong 20 Minutes

You'd be surprised how often students come into the Writing Lab twenty minutes before their paper is due. That specific number comes up all the time. Students who have class at 8:40 show up at 8:20 asking us to "check it" or "make sure it's good." There's honestly not a lot we can do in the last twenty minutes before their teacher expects a final draft because we have to figure out what the student needs to talk about or do in order to learn, plus they have to make changes and print before they are late for class.

That's not to say that there's not a lot we can do in twenty minutes. Two students came in this morning, on at about 9:30, another about ten minutes later. I had to leave for a meeting at 10:00, so I didn't have a lot of time, but each of them got some good work done in about twenty minutes.

The first student had a draft of a paper. It was a summary and response to an excerpt from a book about how being a nerd instead of a cool kid is advantageous in the long run. She had about a page and a half of initial thoughts, and I helped her see the skeleton of ideas she had and how she could add meat onto those bones. We talked about structure and focus, wrote some ideas on the whiteboard, and she was ready to tackle a much more detailed, intentional draft about how she went from being inbetween nerds and cool kids when she was young to choosing the nerd camp as an adult because she saw the advantages of education.

The second student kept talking about how she was writing about the same thing. The first thing I cleared up with her was that she wasn't. They were responding to the same essay, but she had different things to say. She didn't have a draft yet, just a very general thesis statement about dedication being key to success. I asked her how she saw dedication leading to success in the essay (nerds!), whether she was a nerd or a cool kid growing up (cool kid), and how she experienced determination as an important factor to success (cheerleader turned teen mother goes from cool kid to not-so-cool kid and figures out that life is tough but you have to keep on keeping on).

Both of them spent the right twenty minutes in here. If this would have been the twenty minutes before their papers were due, they would have been in trouble because they didn't have much to hand in and they didn't have much time to work. But they came in early enough to get their ideas straight, start thinking through the details of how they learned what they learned, and crank out solid drafts of their papers.

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