Four ain't bad...

I had a full docket today, but two of the appointments were quite short. The first was with a returning student to whom I have not yet given a moniker: I'm rather at a loss how to characterize him in brief. He is an ESL student, and like all of them at this stage in the semester, he's feeling more than a little anxious about whether he'll pass his exit exam. He's the one I first spoke to about that learning trajectory, explaining that of course he still makes the same mistakes--but he's doing all the right things to learn how to correct them. He came in today primarily to get some reassurance. His professor also didn't like his topic sentences, which he had created on the advice of a friend who is more advanced in his academic career. His professor said they were too long, which is true; they were also clunky and repetitive ("The first reason X is the case is because," "The second reason X is the case is because," and so on). And I give credit to the professor for urging him to consider a cleaner style (which also provides less opportunity for error), but I think the kid has much larger concerns. Once again, I talked to him about the need to check his work at the end of the exam period, but this time I talked to him about how to slow down enough that he can see what he actually wrote instead of what he thinks he wrote. The exam is Friday. I expect he'll come in next week to let me know how he did--and if he is my first appointment of the day, I will need to be in early: I arrived about three minutes late today, and he was leaving because he thought I wasn't coming. I can see a person having that assumption after ten minutes, though even that might be ungenerous, but three? It may be bad form for the professor to be late, but we are human and run into unexpected snags, just like anyone else. But of course, to most students, we are not actually human at all. We are some completely alien species. (This is why my students are so stunned when they happen to run into me away from campus--especially in the summer, when I'm wearing a tank-top and shorts and doing something mundane like my grocery shopping. Though I confess having a bit the same feeling about some of my teachers: it was just weird to see them out of context.)

The other brief appointment was with a student who just wanted help with APA documentation, both in-text citations and the references page. I continually tell students they need to own an actual, physical style manual, not rely on the web. This young man agreed, actually; he'd just never encountered such an animal before (which I find strange, but there you have it). But he was bright and got the point quickly, so that was easy.

The two long appointments were more challenging. Both students came in with quite lengthy essays, which of course I didn't have time to go over in detail, and both students had trouble with the structure of their essays. The first of those students also had systemic ESL errors in her work, but I didn't address those for the most part; I was more concerned that she get her ideas organized. I went through her essay and pointed out to her the various topics she addressed--and the way she would flip back and forth among them--and I created a flow-chart: paragraph 1 is about this; paragraph 2 is about this, and so on. Then I told her she needed to go through her essay sentence by sentence to determine which topic she was addressing and organize accordingly. She wanted me to do that with her, asking whether X sentence should go in Y paragraph, but I told her she needed to make those determinations on her own. I also had to explain that she could quote only part of a sentence from a source. The quotations were overly long and tended to swamp her ideas. But the funniest part of that meeting was when I asked her what her topic was. I'd swear she said "Bowling." I even asked her: "Bowling??" and she said yes. So when she said one part of her paper was "solutions," I said, "solutions? to bowling? What do you mean?" She said something about how schools and parents could get involved--and I'm thinking, "OK, she's making an argument for the development of more interest in the sport." Then I saw the first sentence of her essay. "Bullying is a serious problem today." I didn't laugh out loud, but I came close.

The second student was much more facile with the language and had stronger ideas, but he didn't connect his ideas to each other very well, skipping over rather large ravines from paragraph to paragraph with nary a verbal bridge to get the leader from one topic to the next. He also did what all too many students do, which is he wandered very, very far from the poem he was supposed to be analyzing, so I talked to him about how to make transitions and how to connect his ideas back to the poem itself. He was hard to get a read on: very low affect. But I think he got it. He plans to be back in the Center tomorrow morning to go over what he's done with another tutor; I hope he gets good help.

The slightly maddening thing about both of those appointments, however, is that both may have been wasted effort. The young woman said she had already revised three times, and she wasn't sure whether the professor would accept the essay again. The young man said nothing of the kind, but when I looked at the assignment sheet, I saw that the deadline was last week. Of course, his professor may have changed the deadline, or she may have returned the essay to him and recommended (or demanded) a revision, but I do hope she will accept the work at this date.

And that concludes the early part of this week. Right now, I have two students on my docket for Thursday: Silent Betty and Annabelle. Annabelle was in today, working with another tutor and clearly driving that tutor bonkers. I suspect that her "research" paper is a chaotic mess, as that tends to be this young woman's problem: that chasing down rabbit trails thing. So I will have to gather my patience in both hands to be ready to deal with her. I wish I could say, "You know what? You don't really want to accept  what I have to offer, so why don't you see someone else?" But I can't. As the head of the Center said about the Hostile Wall, we can't ban someone for being annoying. More's the pity.

For now, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I'm in the office to go downstairs and engage in some bulk shredding. I'm cleaning out files at home, and my little home shredder has given up the ghost, apparently--but I have enough to shred that I might as well use the big one here. Very gratifying, that. And I'll be back here, blogging, on Thursday.