Very brief...

What on earth is it with my getting students who need help with things about which I sorely lack expertise? I had a student whose English skills are not even sufficient for her to be in our non-credit, developmental class (she's in a special program trying to get students to that point), and then a student who needed help with APA documentation--which I have a nodding acquaintance with, no more--and then a student who wanted help getting ready for an in-class essay in her philosophy class...

Oh, and the student who needed help with APA clearly is a non-native speaker of English, but I didn't have to deal with that. She's in our Nursing program, so she's had to prove her chops as a writer--and in any event, she wanted help with nothing more than the documentation. OK, fair enough, but note to self: I'm bringing the handbook I've used with my own classes to the WC with me in the future. There is a handbook here in my preferred cubicle, but it's unwieldy, so I'd rather have the one I know.

And the student who needed help for her philosophy essay didn't need help with the subject matter, so I really can't complain about not having the expertise to help her. I absolutely can help a student understand how to structure a timed essay, and can offer useful test-taking strategies. So that was good.

The final student of the day needed help understanding why her professor kept responding to her writing with "your idea is not clear here." The idea wasn't clear because of mixed grammatical structures, not because of anything wrong with the actual idea (and that makes me want to give some instruction to the professor about the difference). Hard to untangle some of those structures, but the student is a native speaker of English--or at least has spoken it long enough that she has no accent and doesn't demonstrate ESL-type errors--so I could suggest that she speak the sentences as she writes them, or at least as she corrects them. She can hear when something has gone wonky; the reason she doesn't write clearly is, as she is writing, she "zones out" and the words just fall out of her head without actually registering as anything that makes sense. I'm glad I had the presence of mind to ask her if she could hear her own voice in her head as she writes, because when she can, she's fine--but in fact she can't always, and that's the problem. I have to say that I'm not really aware of hearing my own voice in my head as I write (though I'm hyper-aware of it right now, of course, since I'm thinking about it), but I think I must...

Anyway, that's it for this week. I just gave a big chunk of feedback to my individual student, but I notice that she has not responded to my long email of yesterday in which I talked to her about the importance of reading. I think she may be starting to resist the process, as I'm not as purely laudatory as she may desire but am making some demands of her thinking. But we'll see what happens. And I'm about to head back to the office so I can print out another submission for Mean Streets that I've been asked to read to make a recommendation for acceptance or not. That will be fun.

And that's a wrap. Maybe next week I'll write a little about how odd it is to have Wednesdays off; I spent yesterday thinking my week was over, but no.... Now it is, though. And on we roll.