ESL ... again, but also grammar

I cannot express how much I look forward to working with students who do not have ESL issues. I only had two students today, and I will say, the second of the two didn't have much in the way of ESL stuff going on--some dropped -d endings, a few minor deals like that--so working with her was pretty good, pretty easy. She primarily wanted help understanding the difference between complex/compound sentences and run-ons; apparently in a previous class she tended to write run-ons, and now she's gone to the other extreme and is writing fragments. I can show students the difference between them with examples, but she asked me to just give an overview of basic sentence structure, and I'm damned if I can explain. The best I can do with explaining a predicate is to say it's "who is doing what," but then we get into the situation of subordinating conjunctions and other words that create dependent clauses (another term I know but find very difficult to explain/define), and ... oh argh. This is not, not, not my best thing. And this is why I resolutely refused to reach developmental/remedial classes. I can't do it in any way that makes sense.

However, in the case of student #2, I didn't have to spend a lot of time on that, because she also wanted help understanding how to revise--which also led to what to keep in mind when writing in the first place. And that I can do.

Student #1, however, was a whole different ball of wax. She was in earlier, working with one of my colleagues, and the main thing I heard him saying over and over was, "I can't hear you; you have to speak louder." Man, he wasn't kidding. The poor young woman is brave enough to come to the WC for help, so she's got some fire in the belly, but she is terrified to be heard. I don't want to think what her family life is like; I can't imagine what it must be to self-efface to that extreme. She seems a sweet, gentle soul, but, well, how do we encourage someone to use her actual, physical voice, not just the metaphoric one in her writing? I don't know that we can; we're bucking something much deeper and more entrenched than just "you need to speak up."

Meanwhile, on the personal tutoring front, it's interesting working with this girl--and she is a girl, not a woman yet. She is very mature for her age, but I have to keep reminding myself that she is only 16; I may be challenging her to think on a level she just hasn't developed enough to reach yet. Her writing is so grown-up in some ways, and then I come across something that is hackneyed or overly pat, and I wince. How do we combat "microaggression"? Easy! We just need to become "upstanders"! Well, fair enough, but if it were that easy, why aren't there more "upstanders"? And what makes a microaggression a microaggression anyway? And and and. Poor thing, she's going to lose her mind over my question-question-question methodology.

But she's also dealing with a more deep-rooted resistance to writing that has to do with addressing herself as a person, I think. Although she used to love to journal, she just can't bring herself to do it any more. I suggested she journal about how she doesn't want to write in her journal, but she reports that she can't even open the journal book, maybe because she's just being "mellow dramatic" (which I love as a mis-hearing of the term). I gave her an assignment tonight: open the journal, write one sentence, close the journal, put it away and put it out of her mind entirely. Report to me tomorrow. I'll be interested to hear what she says--and whether she can even do that much--but as I'm writing this, I think I'm going to completely alter my approach. I'll say, "OK, maybe this just isn't a time in your life when you want or need to journal." After all, I've gone long, long stretches--I'd have to check to see what the longest was, but I suspect it was a matter of years--without writing in mine, and yet I have a record going back, however sporadically, to when I was 18. So, the journal will be there when she wants it again. Let it go.

Unless she finds that writing the one sentence unlocks something in her. If it was painful to do, or if she couldn't do it, then I will definitely say, "OK, not the time for a journal. Write other stuff, wherever/whenever you like, but don't force it." If it unlocks something, if all she needed was that initial ice-breaking, that's great. I'll be very interested to hear which way it went.

Switching back to the WC tutoring, I actually am half tempted to take some kind of teaching course specifically designed to help ESL students with their grammar concerns. Well, maybe a quarter tempted. A little tempted. Not tempted enough that I'll do it, but tempted enough that I just did a quickie Google search to see what's possible. I reckon I'll simply muddle along and do the best I can--and if I get myself into a real knot, I'll ask one of the other tutors--especially the interim second-in-command, who is a grammar maven--to help be untangle the knot. I did think--very briefly--that it might be beneficial to have a certificate or some dumb thing if there's a chance I could use it to get a position at the writing lab at the community college in Montana, but ... well, if that's the case, I'll do it when I'm there. Assuming they are hiring. And pay anything worth getting out of my bunny slippers to earn.

So, that's the latest. There is a chance that tomorrow will be a "snow day"; if the snow/sleet combination is as dicey as it might be, it's likely--but the good news is, I get four "leave" days, so I'll get paid for it anyway. (Mercenary me.) And honestly, I don't mind at all getting paid to stay home, assuming there is power and heat. And I'll leave it at that for the noo. Onward and awkward. Excelsior.