Tag Archives: Work

Poetry Exercise of the Day

In case people are bored and want to do some writing, here’s the exercise I did during the Writing Center’s staff meeting this morning. Grab a literary journal (any one of sufficient length will suffice) and use the lines from random parts of that journal to create a new poem, called a cento. A cento is essentially a poem constructed using the words of other authors (our boss called it a “plagarized poem”, which is accurate enough, except that it’s cut from multiple authors). This is a very interesting exercise, and some of the other people that tried it came up with pretty good results. Another way to do sort of the same thing is to take a very old copy of a book, take a page out of that book, and randomly paint on the page so that some words are painted over and some aren’t. The words that aren’t construct a poem. It’s best not to read the page before you do this and just semi-randomly take out words. I suggest doing this with really old, run-down paperbacks – it reduces the shock of tearing pages out of books.

The Writing Center director is a poet, hence all the poetic exercises that she throws at us tutors from time to time!

Jobbiness

It’s not official yet (shhh…), but I’ve been hired at the Writing Center for 10 hours/week this summer, with the possibility of adding on more hours as the summer goes on. This is good in that it at least gives me some sort of job, but obviously, the hours are a bit lacking. The problem being that any other work needs to come from off-campus resources due to the fact that institutional positions are limited to 19 hours/week by law.

Not to worry — bosses to the rescue! The Writing Center director is a very cool woman. She offered to put some feelers out to some resources she has in the community, including a design firm that might be willing to take me on for summer employment. She might also be able to send some design accounts my way.

Uber-cool.

On a semi-related note, I submitted an electronic copy of my résumé to Paguirigan, a branding and design firm with an office downtown. They aren’t hiring, but I figured it was worth a shot anyway. That and the domain name they use is just too attractive to me!

Teaching Philosophies

I’ve had the chance during the last few weeks as the quarter winds down to think about my own philosophy behind teaching. This stems out of both my work as a writing tutor in the College’s Writing Center and as a lab aide for Logo programming with the Designing Languages and Algebra to Algorithms programs this quarter.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for teaching, which has deepened since I started working in tutoring positions, and deepened even more as a lab aide. As a lab aide, the strategies are basically exactly the same as they are when tutoring — lead the student to the answer for whatever question they’re asking. However, the process requires more breaks from that strategy: if a student doesn’t understand something, lab aides are expected to clue them in a bit with a nudge in the right direction, which usually means giving them some portion of the answer.

I’ve found that, as a lab aide, it’s very easy to understand what the lab is asking for, and it’s also easy to know the answer to the lab (so long as you’ve done the appropriate preparation beforehand), but it’s very hard to convey what the lab is about, much less convey the answers, to students. Thus, I’ve really been struggling this quarter with coming up with good ways to explain and relate concepts back to work that they’ve already done.

I found this especially true while in the lab last Thursday. The lab itself had to do with fractals — specifically, the Koch Snowflake (also known as the Koch Curve). The process of creating the fractal is very easy — using a standard triangle, “kink out” each side in order to create a level two Snowflake. Then, to create a level three Snowflake, use all the sides in a level two snowflake and “kink” those out. The Wikipedia entry has a graphic that shows the progression quite nicely. This is basically just the same idea applied over and over. It can be applied recursively (though that’s not really a great solution), but it’s actually better to implement it recursively for levels three and up. For levels two and one, it’s better to have a separate procedure to draw them, since the logic is so different.

Relatively straightforward, but very hard to explain when you’re not supposed to give students the answers.

While the strategies are really quite similar, the result is quite different — as a writing tutor, the final result of any session with me isn’t necessarily an answer, unless the student brings in a very specific question. Most often, in addition to an answer, students get an idea of what needs to be done next in order to allow their writing to grow. Not so as a lab aide — the process stops once the student gets the answer. They can certainly move on to other projects, and we, as aides, will help them find the answer for that project, but there is no sense of programming as a process. Which is ironic — programming is a process, but that process isn’t as obvious as it is in writing.

My philosophy as a tutor has always been that writing, as a process, needs to be nurtured and recognized. Academic writing may be perceived as boring, but it sets students up with an important life skill if taken advantage of properly: the art of written communication. My job as a writing tutor is to help inspire and install that art, and to help students realize that the process is ongoing. You can’t stop after a single draft (though there are exceptions to this); one has to keep going. With programming, the process very definitely stops — once the program’s written and it runs, at least in an academic environment, you’re done with it and probably won’t touch it again.

It’s true that that’s not true in the software world at large, but for the purposes of my lab aide work, it’s good enough.

PNWCA Conference Write-Up

On April 16, I had the opportunity to attend the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association Conference as part of the delegation from Evergreen. I thought I’d post my notes and thoughts here, though they probably won’t mean much to very many people.

Getting There: The conference was at the University of Washington – Bothell campus, which put me about 20 minutes from home and in an area that I’m quite familiar with. The trip up was uneventful, though we left at 6:30 in the morning and ended up hydroplaning half the way there due to heavy rains.

Keynote: After the Center, Then What? Writing Centers and the New Work Order
The keynote speaker for the conference was Nancy Grimm from Michigan Technological University. In it, she discussed how writing centers prepare peer tutors for their future placement in the workforce, and talked a lot about how the modern workspace mirrors the work done in writing centers nationwide. She discussed the old order versus the new order, in reference to two different approaches to management and the distribution of knowledge. The old order was when knowledge was centered amongst a particular group of people high up in the management hierarchy. The new order, on the other hand, is modern times, when knowledge has been distributed amongst employees, and when the addition or loss of an employee can drastically affect the knowledge base that a company has. Writing centers help tutors develop the capacity for ethical thinking, as well as developing an awareness surrounding their relationships to other people. She also discusses how writing center allows the development of knowledge management skills crucial within the new order, which involves literacy and the language used within writing center work: accessing information and crossing boundaries, for instance. She closed by giving a list of five things that any writing center director should do in order to maximize ethical thinking in the workplace:

  1. Review mission statements to see if they reflect the impact that the Center has campus-wide.
  2. Reconsider what makes a good writing tutor within a global context; promote diversity in staff.
  3. Reconsider how we think about tutor training; training is not the same as education.
  4. Consider the promotion of literacy for the new work order; how will newcomers to the center improve the quality of work at the Center?
  5. How does the Center engage with being at the center or at the margins of the educational process?

None of these five points are exact quotes, but what I understood them to be. This was an excellent start for the conference, as it injected everyone with a lot of energy.

Concurrent Session A: The Ripple Effect
The first session I attended was a facilitated discussion about how to create a welcoming atmosphere for writing centers that allows both the tutor and the client to be comfortable in that environment. This was quite an interesting discussion, as I got to listen to a range of different ways that writing centers have created a welcoming environment for extremely diverse populations. There were five discussion questions, which we skipped between as appropriate. Below are my notes on each question:

  1. How can a writing center create a welcoming environment?

    • Get to know students, build relationships
    • Create a personal evaluation form that allows students to track progress
    • Remember the name of the student and state it
    • Advertise/get the word out/class visits
    • Bring classes to the writing center/sample roleplay
    • Treat everyone as a newcomer (including new tutors)
    • Create a "home" for tutors/social activities
    • Open house for all
  2. How can we create a welcoming environment for international students?

    • Have a diverse staff
    • Tutors of same ethnicity as int’l student to help explain
    • Conversation pal program (Highline Community College)
    • Teach skills needed to succeed in American writing
    • Dialog – exploration of ideas
  3. What are some positive consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?

    • Teachers promote the center
    • Ripple effect – word gets around
    • Elimination of ethnic divisions
  4. What are some negative consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?

    • Americanized writing (non-judgmental)
    • Noise
    • Lack of confidentiality
    • Interrogated feeling

Some of this was stuff I hadn’t considered, though the majority of the attendees seemed to work in centers with a much higher percentage of international students attending than Evergreen’s.

Concurrent Session B: Crossing the Line
This was essentially an ethics workshop. It presented a series of exercises used by Highline Community College to discuss and break down barriers around the ethical considerations of being a tutor. This is something that was extremely interesting to watch, since everyone had four choices after watching a short skit demonstrating a particular ethical dilemma:

  • I would/should do that
  • I would/should never do that
  • I might do that but…
  • I don’t know what I would/should do

The range of responses when asked why people picked their positions was very enlightening to me, and I’ve begun to notice when I do some of the things discussed in this workshop. For me personally, this was very interesting, and I may end up taking it to Evergreen’s Center Director and pitching it for inclusion in one of the staff retreats.

Concurrent Session C: Communicating with Faculty: Exploring Conference Summaries
This was a presentation on research done at Seattle University surrounding the use of conference summaries in tutoring. Essentially, the Writing Center there decided that they wanted to be able to provide some sort of feedback to faculty regarding a student’s progress in a session. A form would be completed at the end of each session and, if the student consented, that form would then be sent to the faculty for whichever class that student came in for. Some interesting results here, namely that most people declined to have that information sent to faculty and that it added a considerable burden on tutors to complete and maintain the paperwork after each session. Evergreen does something like this in response forms, but they’re used for internal tutor evaluations only. After the presentation of the research, we had a short discussion session to clarify any questions we had about the research and to give suggestions on how to improve the system.

This gave me a few ideas, on the off chance that Evergreen’s Writing Center decides to do any revamping of their attendance system in the near future.

Concurrent Session D: Conflict and Compromise: The Question of Required Tutoring
This was a presentation by Evergreen’s own Bo Kinney on whether or not centers should require students to attend sessions. This isn’t one that I can easily summarize, as I don’t have any real notes for it, but suffice it to say that it added a few interesting elements to our own internal debate surrounding required tutoring.

After all the sessions, we had a post-Conference wrap-up, which allowed various groups to give their impression of the day. I found the whole thing to be very educational, though I didn’t take the opportunity to network at all, which I kind of regret — that would have been a very useful endeavor. From my understanding, though, other members of Evergreen’s delegation networked quite well, so we’ll see how those connections add in to our work as a Writing Center.

Summer Job Progress (sort of)

I’ve applied to the State of Washington as an Information Technology Technician 1. I got a test score of 70, which puts me literally on the lowest end of the job scaling — the minimum score to be considered is 70. We’ll see whether that actually turns out to provide me with a job or not.

I may end up working for the Writing Center over the summer, but obviously that was sufficiently unclear that I decided to file an application with the State. I might also apply at the Best Buy down the street to be a computer technician, though I’m undecided on that.

We’ll see what happens.

May Be a Programming Lab Aide

I was recently offered a position as a programming lab aide for both Algebra to Algorithms and Designing Languages next quarter, but there’s a slight problem — one, I don’t know the details for this, so I don’t even know if I’m eligible, and two, the group contract I’m working on for next quarter seems to like the idea of meeting at the same time that this paid position would require me to be there.

I’ve requested some clarification from a few people, but I’ll so be all over that position if I can do it.

naturalaxis Announcements Page

I have just finished the PHP code needed to put naturalaxis’ Announcements and Press Releases page online. This has been offline for quite a while, but now has all the naturalaxis newsletters that have ever gone out, including the new ones in HTML format. It will also dynamically update itself when I add in a new newsletter to the system.

And with that, back to reading James Joyce’s Ulysses.