Instructor's Station in the Writing Center

I arrived at the Writing Center this morning a few minutes before eight o'clock. As I unlocked the door, I had a student at my heels just itching to get in. I turned to say, "Could you just give me a couple moments to get the computers, the printers, and all monitors switched on?" He was quite polite and backed-off. I quickly lapped the room, touching every "on" button and then opened the door again and invited him in.

Ninety minutes into my morning duty, I realized that I would have no assistance from tutors or a lab clerk. Because of the lack of funding, we are operating on a thin budget and the instructor is the only employee in the Writing Center. So at one moment this morning it was me and sixty-plus students and many of them needed me to take a quick look at their writing or their Writing Center assignment. The literature students wanted me to proofread their essays, which we do not do. I have fun, though, enticing them to read their compositions to me. When this day is gone, what I will remember are two students whose diligence and tenacity impressed me.

A young Pakistani student new to college, asked me to discern if his paper was coherent. I asked him to read aloud to me. He was a typical youth. He read fast and slurred his words so that the edges of every syllable were rounded into the next. It was quite difficult to understand him. Thankfully, I was also silently reading the text on his paper. After he voiced the first paragraph, I stopped him to ask a couple questions. Then I read aloud his first paragraph, doing my best to read slowly and articulately. I find that students are silently impressed when they hear something read clearly. Then I asked him to read the next paragraph. At that point he read more slowly and much more clearly. His essay had a good message. There were simply some surface errors that needed correction; some simple editing. I asked how long he had been learning English. When he answered that he had been in our country one year, I complimented him on the tremendous progress he had made. I can't imagine moving to Pakistan and learning the language (at all, no less in one year).

Later in the morning, an Asian young woman wanted to read her literature essay to me. That gets much tougher because the lit students are analyzing short stories that I haven't read. So it was more than a challenge to understand her as she explained the assignment and then tried to explain the plot of each story she was comparing and contrasting. For a moment I internally wondered why I hadn't stayed home to float in the pool all day. After struggling to understand her, I asked if she would read her essay aloud. I was still more than challenged listening and trying to understand her very broken English. I realized then that she needed to hear English spoken more than I needed to have her read her draft outloud. So I read aloud slowly and deliberately and together we asked and answered questions about her essay. She was so genuinely thankful for my help that I wondered why I don't teach ESL (English as a Second Language). Few, very few, of my basic writing students are so gracious. Most of them are just POed that they've graduated from American high schools, but can't qualify to enter Freshman Composition at the community college.

So, late this afternoon when I realized that I had not used my camera all day, I photographed my station in the Writing Center. The image in the glass beside my space is the reflection from the window on the wall across the room. Those are the foothills south of Corona, the community where I live. Those same foothills can be (and have been seen in my blips) from our backyard. That window separates the tiny Writing Center office from the main center. In that office is an exit door that has a lookout to the corridor.

Now it is almost 8:30 Monday evening. It is still light outside and it is the final Monday of June . . . hard to believe. Hope your tomorrow will be worth remembering.

Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol