An interesting question....

How should a writing consultant handle a student who is resistant to receiving help from the writing center?

As a speech consultant at the Speech Center, more often than not, I have students come in for appointments only because they are required to come in by their class/professor. Usually these types of students come in completely unprepared and often don't care much about what you have to say. It can be frustrating working with these student in the Speech Center, but I can only image how frustrating it can be in the writing center as well. I was wondering how other schools/students deal with these kind of students... From my own experience, I tend to just do the consultation like any other consultation and still give feedback and suggestions even if the student does not care to hear it. Just because the student is disinterested doesn't mean that I shouldn't still do my job. Maybe, my suggestions and criticism will in turn make the people more interested or better the presentation even if it doesn't seem that way initially.

I found these articles that mention my question:

http://equality101.net/?p=1121
http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/28
http://www.english.pitt.edu/writingcenter/faq_faculty.html

overall they suggest a variety of things that relate to my topic. For instance:
"If you don’t feel comfortable dealing with a student, you don’t have to continue. Many issues of harassment or embarrassment might arise when you continue in a potentially negative situation. It’s important not to let anyone take advantage of you in a tutoring situation. Approach your Writing Center director or supervisor and let her or him handle the problem."- I guess this is the extreme.
"Always provide the student with the opportunity to read aloud every time you begin an appointment, if reading aloud is part of the process you use in your writing center consultations. If the student does not want to read, don’t force her or him. Encouragement and continued opportunities over a period of time can lead to greater confidence in reading aloud. This works especially well when students gain trust with tutors or confidence in their writing. Also, some students are self-conscious about hearing their work read aloud in a public consultation, where other students may overhear. In other cases, the content of the paper might be something the student doesn’t want to hear aloud. Be as accommodating as possible to a student’s individual needs, shyness, or lack of confidence." This gives some insight on how to deal with students who don't want to do part of the exercise...
"Realizing that some students will never love English can be tough for a tutor to accept-—we are English majors and minors, after all! Get students interested by drawing analogies with things that appeal to them. Use their writing to build them up and they will respond positively in most situations. And always remember that your enthusiasm is the most effective aspect of a session. Tutors shouldn’t feel like they have failed if the student still hates English by the end of the session, because the job of a tutor is to help students gain the life-long communication skills they need to succeed."

"It is more effective and efficient to send individual students to the Writing Center rather than issue a requirement for an entire class. Good tutorials rely on student input; students who don't want to be here or don't see the need to be here take up time that might otherwise be spent on students who would benefit from our services."

I will discuss some of these suggestions and opinions in my blog analysis paper

Last Boys and Girls CLub

I was overall pleased leaving the boys and girls club last week for the final third session. My assigned student and I were able to record her script, which was a great first step in assembling her final product. I was quite surprised at how quickly she was able to record. While the final recording only totaled to about 1 minute and 30 seconds, she was able to pretty much do the entire thing in about 20 minutes. I had her read only one paragraph at a time, so we split it up into 3 different parts. She read each of them once out loud for practice and then once into the microphone. She did great! I remember when I was recording mine, I had so much trouble reading through without messing up.

I also talked with my student about ways to make pictures fit with the message she conveyed in her recording. I had her look up some sample pictures. We would pick a sentence and she would choose a word or idea that fit with the sentence and find a picture for it. She seems to really understand the concept of this digital story. Although I will not be around to see the final product, I am confident that she will produce a great story!

Last Week ESL Speaker

I really enjoyed listening to the speaker that came in last week. She discussed life for ESL students at the University of Richmond and some of the difficulties that they face.
It was interesting how she made us feel like a temporary exchange student. The first five minutes of the class she spoke in Turkish, and had us learn how to say my name is... what is your name and then had us go around the room using Turkish. This was really effective, for since English is just a dominant language, I have been in very few situations where using English hasn't worked.
I can only remember one time, in Paris, when ordering gelato, that I needed to use French. I was overwhelmed and confused, so I can only imagine what students with ESL feel like when their American teacher at Richmond is speaking quickly in a language that isn't their first.
I really liked her suggestion that we should try and develop a common bond with the ESL student that we tutor. She said that learning goodbye or a simply, yet silly phrase makes the student feel more comfortable. I would completely agree.

Boys and Girls Club Round 2

This time at the Boys and Girls club, I felt a little bit better about my experience. My assigned student, Nelestra had completed her interview, however, she forgot all of her notes. She interviewed her father. Since we did not have the notes in font of us to work with. I just started talking with her a little bit using basic questions necessary in an interview. From these questions she was able to remember a little bit of what he said. She also added some of her personal opinions to the remarks that he said. For instance, she discussed her feelings on the pearl of wisdom that he gave her and how it influences her.
We emailed her the writing that we did, so hopefully next week when we go, she can combine our written script with her forgotten information and we can record.

ESL Readings

I always enjoy reading the Writing Lab Newsletters. I found the previous one particularly interesting and decided to comment on this article for this week's blog post on the class readings. I think the best line/advice in this article for us as consultants to remember is that:

"Each group faces very different problems and tends to produce characteristic mistakes which result from confusion of the structures of their native language with those of English, and from writing to satisfy cultural expectations which are very different from those of the United States. Language is an expression of culture, and the influence of either upon the writing of foreign students cannot be understood without considering the other as well."

I really agree with this idea that language is an expression of culture. Evening thinking about in Japan the important of Haiku's; these simple, yet beautiful poems can be quite powerful, even though they may just be short and sweet. I feel like as an American, I am so used to arguing and explaining, however, not everyone writes in this manner. It definitely makes me think about whether or not I would be helpful when consulting an ESL student. Would I get frustrated or be super confused?

Classmate Consultation Project

I am in the process of writing my 5 page paper justifying what I will do in my consultation based on what we have learned in class. I am struggling to meet the length. After reviewing the paper, I feel that I just do not have that much to consult on. The paper I received was an outline, so I find that I really will only have to focus on the prompt, the thesis, and connecting the supporting information to the thesis. I almost feel pressured to incorporate information that we read in class even though it does not really apply to my consultation, just in order to get the length to where it needs to be. I am a little torn on exactly how to go about finishing this part of the assignment. Any suggestions?

As I read the article for today about the research and discovery about literacy in Pittsburgh, my hometown, I found that it was particularly interesting how the definition of literacy is different to us now and changed over time. I never thought of literacy outside of her basic definition "ability to read and write" either, but it seems that situational factor such as war and culture really did influence the definition.

Moving on, I was very similar to the author in high school. I knew that not going to college wasn't even an option and I took 6 AP classes and every honors course offered. Reading about how many students don't graduate, and of the small portion that does, less than half make it to some type of post high school education is absolutely amazing. In my own city, I want to estimate that the Northside is about 20 minutes from where I am from, there can be students who are the absolute antithesis of each other.