PeerCentered

Following Alisha's post, I wanted to bring up a couple more points on familiarity. As I settle into the center (I'm settling a bit uncomfortably since I just spilled a full water bottle all over my lap) and refamiliarize myself with the goings-on of the composition support community, I'm also watching visiting writers tentatively settle back into writing mode. A few appointments are appearing on the online scheduler, a few faces are peeping around the corner and taking bookmarks, and one student in particular came in, asked if I liked his haircut, and started making coffee. He was certainly a character--all people return to patterns in different ways, I suppose. After he made his coffee, he asked if I would work with him on his writing. It was a graded English 102 paper from last semester. Why was he bringing it into the center? Maybe he was putting me through some kind of assessment to see if I was the right tutor for him. I don't know...I do know that classes ...

Well, a spankin ' new semester has managed to wriggle itself around my time, all my time, and I'm sure that it's managed to find everyone at BSU and Peercentered , too. Although a bit overwhelmed with my current class schedule, I find that I am very excited about escaping into the warmth of writing center. Truth is, I missed it while on the (super, super) short Christmas vacation. Needless to say, I'm happy to get back into consulting. Perhaps I am so excited about it because it's almost like returning to something familiar, only to discover that your perspective's a bit different. I stopped by the center a few times last week--to fill out paperwork, etc--and, to my surprise, it felt a bit like the first time that I saw my childhood bedroom after moving away from home. No, the center didn't look significantly smaller, at least not the front area, but it all felt really different. I took me a few hours to fully realize WHAT seemed so "off" to me, ...

I realized this evening that this January marks my fifth year as a writing tutor (I'm even including that one semester I was banned from tutoring because I was student teaching). That's a really long time to tutor - or it could be because it's the longest I've ever had the same job title. Last semester - my first as a grad student - I took a class in which I recorded a tutoring session, transcribed it, and then wrote a really long paper about it ("really long" being a relative term). And I bumbled my way through the process, thinking that I was doing fine - I had no real problems transcribing the experience (unlike some, who seemed to spend weeks on the process); and I hadn't a real problem reflecting on my tutoring because my first director was, I think, excellent in so many ways, not the least of which was getting us to reflect on our sessions. Yet he nagged at me for semesters and years to record a session; I didn't listen. And now I wish I had list...