Anyone that's taught anything ever will probably tell you that there's more to teaching than just knowing a thing that your student doesn't know. Beyond that, there's as many theories about how much you need to know and what else you have to know/do in order to be a good teacher.

Take a minute and tell us what you know that a student doesn't know (if you think there's anything at all, ever), and what role that plays in your consulting. Do you know something they don't know that you're explicitly instructing them in? Do you just do a thing that they can't do that doesn't involve them getting something from you that you know and they don't know.

What else might you know (if anything, ever) other than what you might explicitly instruct a student in?

And here's a verse from the Covenant song that has the same title as the subtitle of today's prompt:

Go to the Empire State and watch the city lights
Hear the noise of millions struggle in the sprawl
Stare into the sky, we're few and far between
Black eyes full of stars, wide with memories

The title which, by the way, doesn't come from the song so much as my own answer to the prompt, but you can talk to me about that some other time. I'm busy.

I'm going to subject you all to some of it here:

One suggested explanation for this society's inability to effectively teach its oppressed classes and minority cultures is that teachers approach those students in a wrong-headed fashion. We tend (we being White Anglo-Saxon Teacher Educators) to think of a student who isn't achieving to be suffering from some lack or deficiency in their upbringing, material situation, etc. We look for the deficiency, then remediate as needed.

Perhaps a better way–or anyway another way–would be to look for the strengths in a student and work to teach what you have to teach in terms of the strengths the student already possesses. E.g., if mathematics is easy for the student, then you teach them what you can in terms of balanced equations or proofs and verifications; if the student understands structural mechanics and civil engineering, then you work to teach in terms of leverage, weight and balance.

Or whatever. The gist is that you know what the student wants to know; the trick is not to remediate so they can understand it in your terms, but to creatively find terms that the student will understand and accept. You can take that theory of good teaching or leave it, but I think the importance of teaching to students' strengths remains an interesting one independent of the truth of that theory.

My question to you, then, is how [do you/might you/will you] assess a students strengths before you start working with them?

Generic constraints demand lyrics from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum:
Writhing in the old bliss
Never forget this
Reeling in the sweet grip
Never let this slip
Your eyes are yours to close
Never let go Sleep is wrong
"Do not go gently
Into that good night
Rage against the
Dying of the light"
Your eyes are yours to close
Never let go Sleep is wrong
When I grow up I'm never gonna sleep
When I grow up I'm never gonna cry
When I go out I'm never coming home
When I grow up I'm never gonna die

2 NNS graduate students, trying to get their theses together so they could submit them and defend in the next two weeks, then go home to their far-off lands. Difficult stuff. They wanted editing, and they wanted it bad and they were going to kill me if they didn't get it.

One person was an electrical engineer, talking about processes that were beyond my ability to make sense out of foreign symbolic systems. The other was an HR/Organizational Psychology person, who I hated on principle.

But I'm not an editor, so I didn't just edit their papers. I'll admit I did more marking-up than I usually do, but I did try to beat around other bushes when I found a stick to swing.

Tell me what you'd edit and what you wouldn't and why. Bonus "JIM Won't Ask You For Money Next Time He's Hungry" points to anybody that can do this without using the word "idea" or "grammar."

And because I've decided Dan and I are in a contest to see who can get the cooler lyric in the end of their blog posts and comments, I now provide you some lovely poetry from Mastodon:

Angels dancing with a mortal a sin
A giant born within a woman's womb
Nephilim walking through the forest breaking limbs
As we bow and give respect to the gods

Save yourself
Don't wait on me
My feet are sewn
Endless bottom

The church is burning from the inside out
Altars falling into ashes again
An eagle fly upon horizons with sight
Focusing on all our family and friends

Here's the active split, as I see it. Take it for what it's worth, murder it, then set it on fire in the comments:

If we're educators, then we need to be teaching something that students can't or aren't learning elsewhere in the university. That's probably not how to write like a literary professional, medical doctor, or lawyer, but it's got something to do with writing. Probably.

If we're service providers, we're getting something done for people that they don't have time or talent to get done themselves.

When I break it down like that I'm pretty sure that writing consultants are educators, not service-providers. I'm not doing anything FOR a writer that sits down with me, apart from showing them some big errors that jump out at me. Apart from doing some basic pointing-out of stuff that offends me, more than anything I'm trying to connect process and product for people in a way that helps them get comfortable with writing things. If I'm teaching, I'm teaching people to be more comfortable with the process of creating language from nothing.

Wrong? Right? Wrong-headed?

What if I call it "non-preservative inquiry?"

The goal there isn't to actually change anything, but the work you do in that context doesn't take seriously the belief that what you've written is necessarily worth keeping.

I think I might like that better.

Lets keep killing this term. Everybody hates it, and some of you seem to have conditioned yourselves to have negative responses to it. Replace it with a term and a definition.

Not Evaluating

I've been reading the flurry of recent activity in everyone's blogs, and I want to combine the co-occurring memes of radical revision and grade-focusedness. I feel like we're all a little unsure about where the help is in at once trying not to evaluate anything and assuming that things are never as good as they can be, so I thought I'd just try to describe what those two things mean to me and how those convictions are expressed in my practice as a consultant.

When we talk about not evaluating things, I think sometimes that gets misread as "you can't say whether it's good or bad," which is kind of an oversimplification. Not evaluating something has more to do, in my mind, with deciding whether or not something meets some predetermined standard or minimal condition. When I say I don't evaluate things, I mean I try not to assume I know exactly what those standards are or what minimal conditions for "success" are.

The reason that I do that is pretty simple: I can't really say with much certainty that I do know either of those things. I've been doing this for a long time, so I can make some pretty reasonable guesses, and I might know where to do some research to learn what they actually are, but the fact is that when the student is there in front of me I can't say with any real certainty that I know what perfection or even adequacy looks like.

What I gain from this approach, though, is a chance to let students work through their ideas with my help. It's easy to fall into the evaluation pattern of behavior because it focuses on the paper, and makes the job a lot more straightforward and harder to screw up. What it doesn't let you do, though, is let somebody think of things they've never thought of before. By asking questions and having a conversation where you just agree or disagree, understand or don't understand, you make the kind of leaps that make learning happen in a more enjoyable way, in my experience.

Does that have problems implicit in it, especially when the student comes in wanting something more straightforward? Sure, but I can respond to that pretty easily because it's so simple. It's foolish for me to go running to that editing style so quickly though, since the frustrations or complaints–in my experience–frequently mask a person who might have better ideas but "just wrote the paper" as quickly as they could. ]]> 2005-11-28T18:47:59Z 2004-10-11T14:18:32-06:00 tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2004:/olive040/swscourse//676.7376 2004-10-11T19:18:32Z

I'm the worst drafter in the world. It takes me forever to get started on a project, then it takes me longer still to reach a productive pace on it. By the time I've completed something that's whole enough to be considered a draft, it's already 2 days late and I have to quickly hammer out what hasn't been started and hand in a first draft... if it's even complete. I tell this to clients and am surprised every time they don't call me a fraud and walk out of the building.

It's interesting for to think about where my authority comes from in this job if I'm sitting at this desk amazed at the talent and conviction it takes to compose something whole by or before the date it's expected in the hands of an evaluator. I've been sharing good strategies and productive methods with students for years, and many of them even take my advice and become much more skilled or comfortable writers with it. Why is that possible? Am I just a convincing person? Is it just due to the fact that I'm just the guy that's sitting at the desk when they're told "It's time to see your consultant now?"

I think the truth is built from those pieces, but ends up as something more. I've studied good ways to work with people on their writing, and I think the least frequently suggested minimum entry requirement for being a good writing consultant is that you be a good, strong, successful writer. You should know what you like, and you should be able to be articulate about why you do or don't like something, and you should be familiar with resources and strategies that can get something you don't like closer to something you do like, but actually being able to take the reins and do the rocking yourself seems like it would be counterproductive.

So, yeah. I have authority in these matters. I know what I like, I know what works for people, and I can talk about both things at the same time. The one thing I can't do is stop riding my bike and playing video games long enough to start a paper early enough to have it finished on time. Put like that, those things don't even seem that closely related.

The trouble for me is that I don't think there's any really good way to prepare to work with NNS/EFL/OMGWTFBBQ students because that's an unworkably broad category. Once I've seen enough students that are, say, Korean speakers of English, THEN strategies start to emerge. Their treatment of outside sources or their own ideas becomes clearer to me, and I can offer productive responses. I feel comfortable doing that with Korean and, to a lesser extent, West African speakers, since I spent 3 years at MSU where those were the dominant populations, but I'm still struggling with the Japanese, Chinese, and East Africans that we see more of here.

I hate that there isn't a better answer, but I really don't think we need to go any further in thinking about NNSes (at least in terms of practice) than "that person doesn't speak this language. Gotta figure out what they speak and what that means for their writing." That's as close as you're ever going to get to an approach to NNS consulting, for my money.

I don't really see my job as being subversive or revolutionary, but I think North's desire to be that kind of a teacher comes from his identifaction of places where the university education fails students. I see those same failings, since much of the way writing and reading are taught aren't particularly productive in training people to be good scholars or just generally critical human beings. Teaching writing that conforms to standards is really important in making people effective communicators, but doing that in a way that fails to realize where and why those conventions occurred cannot make effective thinkers, researchers, or creators.

It's easy for consultants to fall into helping people correct their papers to make sure that they conform to conventions; that's what students generally come to us wanting. On the other hand, since we're not the ones doing the evaluating and, increasingly, we're not even credible members of the audience to whom they're writing, I don't think the most productive use of consultant time is to spend it looking for errors in convention and correction. Those things can be hit on and discussed as they come up, but the only thing I'm qualified to do (as somebody who's an experienced reader and writer) is discuss arguments, proof and relationships while I share resources that I've seen over the course of my time as a consultant. The minute I allow myself to be mistaken for an authority on correctness, I'm setting myself and my client up for potential failure.

Approaching a session from a talk-for-talk approach doesn't allow the client to invest me with credibility or authority that isn't mine, and it leaves them space to talk to me like an engaged scholar; someone that can talk about the ideas they have and the work they do with them. This is--unlike editing help--a service that no manual and not enough professors can provide.

We're obviously doing this job because we're experience writers and responders, so when we know something about comma usage or lab report organization we'd be jerks to not share it with somebody who's stuggling with those issues. I think, however, that it's similarly wasteful to isolate ourselves to giving help that eliminates the cheap grade knocks when we could be occupying a position that first engages people as intellectuals. That's what I take from the unstructured talk.

When I take a look at these I get forced to re-inventory all the habits and techniques that I've developed over the course of the last seven years, and it's funny to see the ways that I do things like open a session, explain the work we do, and close a session. I think I have a lot of really specialized approaches that I use for specific "kinds" of students that I see. A strategy for a freshman-looking human, a strategy for a graduate student-looking human, etc. For a younger student I might simply start the conversation with "What's shaking?" or some similar ice-breaking greeting. Older students probably show up with a bit more of an agenda, so a "What would you like to work on today" is much better and more happily recieved.

I have to say though, that the most important part of opening a session is just getting people to relax and talk, no matter what stereotype I might force on them and how that affects my approach. Anybody that sits down thinking that we're about to have a very clinical and professional examination of the paper they brought in is going to be a really inactive partner for me to work with, and I have to make that as impossible as I can right away, and the article hits that nail on the head. So much of what defines writing center work is in just permitting people to relax and talk.