Megan's+Wiki+2.2

Sunday evenings are typically pretty busy; I tend to get more sessions in the two hours that I am there than I get when I work Mondays. So when I realized that I’d be working a weekend during the midterm period, I thought that I wouldn’t have any down time; however, this past Sunday was even more relaxed than the other Sundays that I’ve worked. I didn’t have anyone until about 6:30 when a freshman walked in with an assignment for…English 110! Anyway, she was supposed to pick a topic for a research project, search for sources, and do a rhetorical analysis on each of the sources (I think there were 6 total). She had chosen what looked like reputable articles, so I didn’t have the chance to apply what we learned about information literacy from //The Writing Lab Newsletter//. I did, however, get the chance to see two major ideas at work. She had six sources, and she wanted to look at all six rhetorical analyses, which were, on average, two pages each. I knew that we wouldn’t get the chance to look at everything, so I told her to pick out a couple ideas from each one and we would look at those. She chose the introduction, first paragraph, and conclusion from each one, so we started to work. I noticed that each one had the same problems, like repetitiveness (constantly using “this book” or “this article”), lack of theses, and rambling conclusions. We worked through three of them, which ended up taking an hour after we went through most of the common problems. I didn’t want her to get dependent on my help, but I wanted to make sure that she understood some of the major problems in her writing. As we learned at the beginning of the semester, consultants have to judge for themselves about whether or not to let sessions run long, so I decided to let the session run long because she seemed to need some extra time and support to help her fix some of the elements of her analyses. At the one-hour mark, I decided that I wanted to see if she could apply what we were talking about throughout the session to editing her own work. I asked her to go through the last two herself and pick out what she thought needed to be fixed and hoped that she would catch some of the errors that were common throughout the other analyses. Because I let her work on her own, I told her that I’d stay there and would answer any questions that she might have and that when she was finished, we could go through what she did and see if she understood how to fix the problems that we had discussed throughout the other analyses. She ended up doing a fantastic job, so it was wonderful to see that I //had// actually taught her something! One of the things that we talked about in class but that has not yet appeared in the readings (at least I don’t think) has been the idea of clients wanting some stability in the WC so once they find someone with whom they work well, they will start coming during those times. I already have one student who comes during the time that I work, and I never thought that I was a good enough consultant to have more than one want to work specifically with me; the session that I just discussed, however, produced another student who asked for the times that I work and said that she would come back with more assignments as the semester progressed.