Holy buckets

I am very grateful that it seems my last appointment of the day will be a no-show, as I've just done five appointments back to back, and none of them ran appreciably short. In fact, the last one ran over by 15 minutes, but because that final student wasn't here waiting, I could give the woman I was working with the extra time.

Can we tell final essays are coming due? Yes we can. In fact, I was busy enough on Thursday that I never finished my blog post for the day, I don't think. I'd completely forgotten about it until just this minute. The students are starting to arrive in droves, looking for those last-minute miracles.

The most discouraging appointment of the bunch was a student I helped last week. I think he came in pretty proud of what he had, but I immediately saw serious problems with it--most specifically the lack of a thesis, but also the lack of focus on an argument about the work of literature he was meant to address. As is far too often the case, he used the story as a sort of spring-board to fling himself into talking about a topic in very general terms (a focus his sources supported, but I didn't see anything from his professor saying he needed to find literary criticism in particular, so I didn't give the poor young man a hard time about that). He got very discouraged--especially because he had about five minutes before the essay was due, so there was no way in hell he could make the kind of systemic changes he'd need to make to have a reasonable essay. I said that at very least he needed to add the thesis (and underline it, which his professor requires), but the student fears his essay may not pass, and I fear he may be right.

I remind myself that frequently, these painful experiences are how we learn, but it just makes me sad to know that the young man put energy and effort into exactly the wrong stuff.

In one way or another, every appointment today reminded me how extremely difficult it is to teach this stuff so it sticks. What makes a thesis, what makes an argument, how to use evidence in support of an argument, how to identify specific points and organize them logically: all of it is essential and none of it is easy to explain or to learn how to do in any great hurry. I have no idea how or when I learned it; it almost feels like I just absorbed it by some kind of osmosis. I knew how to write an essay pretty well as an undergrad (though I didn't really learn what a thesis was until I was in grad school, I have to confess). No one ever taught me that I was aware of. I suspect it was just soaked all through every writing assignment I had from the time I first had to write about anything in particular (instead of the first "academic" writing I actually remember doing, in third grade, which was to write a story using all the words on our spelling list and which produced the timeless classic "The Dancing Dentist").

I will say that at least some of the students I saw today had given themselves some time to engage in writing as a process--and were aware that they didn't yet have introductions or conclusions. One student was revising an essay for a Communications class; fortunately, his professor provided a rubric that showed exactly where he would have lost points, so he and I addressed those specific areas. The challenge in that instance was getting across the language barrier: I had a hell of a time explaining that he needed to tell his readers not just the end result of a process but what things had been like before the process began, so we'd see the change.

Focus. Organization. Argument. Evidence. Points. Clarity. Documentation. And then we can get into grammar errors, and punctuation problems, and spelling and/or word choice problems. My head is spinning. It's all so innate to me. Trying to explain how to do it is like trying to explain how to see.

This morning before I left home, I looked at my schedule--but somehow I knew it wasn't going to be as light a day as the schedule reflected. I only had two appointments scheduled at that point. By the time I arrived here, the docket was full. So the fact that tomorrow and Thursday also look light is, I know, very likely to be highly misleading. The Center closes after next Monday, but the semester isn't over until Thursday--I keep forgetting that--so the madness is very likely to continue for my last days here.

I hadn't even thought about the possibility of doing this over the summer, too, but the acting supervisor asked me last week if I'd do it--and there's a possibility that the dates for the second summer session won't conflict with my travels. Picking up some extra income would be very nice. (I had a stress dream about that this morning: I was working at some kind of low-wage, mindless job, the kind for which one punches a time clock, and my boss informed me about a rather expensive medical bill for which I was suddenly responsible--and I burst into tears and put my head down on his desk, wailing, "I can't afford it!" Oh, my psyche: how easily it finds ways to panic itself.) I like the work too. And ... well, honestly, it's going to be harder than I want to admit to say the complete and final goodbye to this institution.

But that's not now. Now, my stint in the Center is all but complete, and I can go off to do my usual Monday evening routine--and be back here, blogging, tomorrow.