My Job is Awesome

The past two hours have been the best two hours of my week at work. Maybe of my month. Scratch that. Of the semester.

1. I got to bust out the claims sheet that I made to help people write papers analyzing songs. They have trouble with that (they can talk about the song or tell the story in the song, but they don't actually analyze it). The writer who needed it wasn't writing about a song, but was analyzing an ad. She understood the ad and the assignment. She just needed to see how to do the work.

2. I helped a girl with a draft of a narrative essay. The first two paragraphs were boring stuff about working at Jack-in-the-Box. Then it got good. See, the story she was telling was about a lady who removed the meat from her burger and claimed that it had no meat. She wanted a new burger. She wanted her money back. She screamed vulgarities. The writer told me that this happens every now and then. I love learning this stuff. Who knew that there was a whole culture of people who order burgers, remove the meat (leaving little black spots that the burger makers recognize as meat evidence), claim there was no meat, and request new meat. They go to a lot of effort for another patty. If that girl does the work, that essay will be awesome.

3. I helped a lady write about owning a dog. Not that exciting in itself, but I got to use one of my favorite strategies: the bowling alley. Often, people have good things to say. Too many, in fact. Their paragraphs bulge or wander (or both) because they have so so so many things to say. They need boundaries. I asked this writer a bunch of questions about her dog and figured out that everything she had to say came down to dog + work. Those were her boundaries. I drew two parallel vertical lines and said, "It's like a bowling alley. These are your boundaries. You can't go outside them." All she cares about it what is between dog and work. If it relates to dog but not work, it's out. She asked about the brand of dog food. Should she include that? On the surface, it relates only to dog. She only gets to include it if it takes a lot of work to get that particular brand of dog food, but only if that's the case.

4. I got to help a guy who was writing about his first day of school in America after immigrating from Saudi Arabia: September 11, 2001. Talk about a unique perspective. He didn't even know English yet. Just Arabic. The funny thing about working with him was that it was right before class. I asked him what he planned to do because he had to turn in the essay. After he assured me that the essay he was handing it wasn't a final, he did want to work on it, and he would take my comments into account, we had a great conversation about his paper, that day, and the kind of details he could include to really help us understand what it was like. I'm excited to see his next draft. I told him that I wanted to see it not as a part of my job, but as a person who likes writing.

I can't believe all that happened over the time I was supposed to be at lunch on a Thursday. That made my week. Sometimes this job is hard. Sometimes it's unbelievably rewarding. I felt like I was inside an episode of This American Life with the burger and 9/11 stories, and two of my favorite strategies paid off for the other two students.