Last night I went to my first writing consultant shadowing with Rob Lindston. If I could only have taken one thing away from this hour it would be the absolute importance of hands-on learning and experience in any kind of classroom situation - following the learning of head knowledge to its application on the ground.
I could possibly write pages on what I observed, but I would like to focus on one comment I heard that struck me very strongly. When Rob was discussing the paper with the student, he pointed out that some of the information she included because her professor liked the example did not really fit with the thesis of her paper and could potentially be cut or revised to improve the overall presentation and writing of the paper. Her response was "I really don't care if my writing is good I just want to give the professor what he wants and get an A". She was obviously stressed, editing a paper the night before it's due for a professor she did not trust or necessarily like, and so everything besides getting a good grade, which in this case meant to her including superfluous information, was obsolete.
This subject of giving a professor what he/she wants at the expense of writing has been brought up over and over again in our class, and so when I was considering what I would focus on in this blog post I initially thought to ignore this comment. However, I think it is so important for us to remember that all of the theories and opinions we discuss and initiate in class have practical applications, are based off realities that take place every day in and outside of the writing center, realities that apply to our experiences as students as well. Rob did a fantastic job of handling this, calming the student by staying positive and pointing out the good points of the paper while helping her improve her paper's writing in general all the while keeping the information that she viewed as essential to her grade. I learned a great deal, not just how to handle this type of situation but about the situation itself.
Rachel, I'm glad you enjoyed your first experience in the writing center. Mine is tonight and I'm a bit curious about what I might find there. It's interesting to see how closely the theories we have read and talked about in class apply to what we perceive to occur in the writing center here at Richmond.
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