Reflections 2015

Andrew Rihn Angie Saunders Ben Rafferty Cami Barber Corrie Tate Daniel Beall Emilia Kandl Jess Lytwyn Jon Silvey Katelynne Shepard Katie O’Brien Kellie Thompson Morgan Cole Nathan Floom Rachel Gift Rob Balla Sandy Dent Steven Fregeau

Andrew Rihn

Writing with and Through Trauma

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Angie Saunders

Writing Assistant Narrative—Spring 2015

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Ben Rafferty

The Inglorious Burden

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Cami Barber

Evaluation Narrative

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Corrie Tate

Personal Narrative and Self Assessment

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Daniel Beall

Strugglin’ in the Studio: Authority and Participation in Group Sessions

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Emilia Kandl

Reading Downtown: Literacy Building and Potential ESL Overlap

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Jess Lytwyn

Different

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Jon Silvey

Untitled

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Katelynne Shepard

Untitled

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Katie O’Brien

Writing Assistant Narrative 38 of Katie O’Brien

Kellie Thompson

Untitled

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Morgan Cole

Reflective Narrative

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Nathan Floom

Writing Assistant Narrative

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Rachel Gift

Writing Assistant SelfEvaluation

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Rob Balla

Yearly Narrative

Sandy Dent

Writing Assistant Narrative 74 and Self-Assessment

Steven Fregeau

Tutoring Students in Fear and Doubt

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Writing with and Through Trauma Andrew Rihn The student population of the Downtown campus is smaller than at the Main Campus, but less prepared for college. As a consequence of these two factors, we tend to see more repeat students, and establish more “personal” relationships with many of our students.

These relationships become important, and sometimes integral, to our tutoring because for many of our students, their needs extend beyond the strict definition of “writing.” As Aimee Barrios states in her 1993 article “When Writing Is Not the Issue” Students who have slipped through the cracks of the educational system sometimes need an ‘accomplice’ to help them reclaim their part of the exclusive, academic higher ground and a writing center tutor is uniquely qualified for that role. (Barrios 9) As we get to know about our students – their family histories, their educational experiences, their access to technology, et cetera – we often learn about the many ways they have “slipped through the cracks.” In addition to their educational backgrounds (which are often quite troubled), students relate to us stories of physical and mental abuse, incarceration, poverty, sexual assault, foster care, and addiction. For many of our students, their writing is a way to express, negotiate, and figure out the burdens of trauma. Part of our job as tutors, then, is to help students navigate the rugged terrain of trauma as safely and productively as possible.

Sometimes these traumas took place decades earlier; 1

sometimes they are more recent. Regardless of when trauma occurs, however, the effects are ongoing. These students are not only dealing with the pressures and stresses of college, they are shouldering the extra burden of trauma. Some students are more forthcoming about their histories than others. In their writing, we see both implicit and explicit references to traumatic events and their continuing after-effects. For example, in the last few semesters, I have heard stories or read papers about:  A husband who overdosed while the student was in another room  An “influential person” essay written about a woman who was burned alive  A student whose alcoholism was so out of control he abandoned his family in a hotel near Cedar Point and had not heard from them in over a week  A student who came to class with fresh bruises and wrote a paper contemplating leaving her abusive boyfriend  An African-American student who said she didn’t notice racism growing up because she was more concerned about the daily abuse she received at home  A “meaningful experience” paper about how once a week she and her siblings had oatmeal for breakfast – a treat because normally they were forced to eat dog food  A paper about the day he figured out that his mom’s “boyfriends” were really johns  A paper about being whipped with extension cords and later forced into prostitution  A student who described his father as a good dad because he “didn’t touch me or hit me much”  A student whose foster parents used him for unpaid physical labor such as landscaping and con2

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struction jobs A student who was molested by her mother’s boyfriend while the mother was sleeping in the same bed A student who spent a significant portion of her youth living in a cult

These are specific examples I rattled off the top of my head with only a couple of minutes' thought. I've heard many, many more stories – some as detailed and specific as the ones above, others more distanced, only hinting at a deep reservoir of trauma and pain somewhere just beyond the edge of the page.

These stories can (and should) tell us many things, and one thing they tell me is that for some students, the idea of “comfort,” of being fully comfortable in a given space, is less a lived reality than an aspiration, something contingent, fleeting, and too-often out of reach.

What they tell me is that sites of education - the classroom, the tutoring session, the college – are also sites of powerful emotion, affective spaces that evade notions of intellectual purity or mind/body duality.

These stories tell me that sites of composition are, as Adam Banks made clear in his CCCC keynote address, sites of “the sweat and the stank of funk, the sweet and the nasty smell of exertion as we break it on down, that signifies not only honest expression, exertion, and integrity, but acumen, celebration, commitment to one’s work, and yes intellect.” As the field of Composition has begun to make the “Affective Turn,” we begin to recognize not only that “objectivity” is impossible, but a dangerous idea. At the same time, we can appreciate the fruits of emotional labor as we do those of intellectual labor.

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Just as working with a student throughout a studio session, or over the course of several semesters, allows us to appreciate her growth as a writer in terms of an increased mastery of skills (sentence structure, paragraphing, genre, audience awareness, etc.), so too does forming lasting relationships with our students downtown allow us to appreciate their emotional growth as they engage and re-engage with the topics that preoccupy their emotional selves. As they work their way through college, negotiating the many pressures of “academic” coursework and the many pressures of traumatized “personal” lives, tutors can serve as what Barrios dubs “accomplices” through this process.

Whether that means providing critical feedback, or directing students to other support services, or merely being a supportive listener, our status as “accomplice” can help struggling students locate their own place within higher ed. In validating their emotions and experience, in recognizing their rawness as authentic, as something to be understood rather than swept under the rug, our work as tutors more fully embraces the idea that “composition” is about much more than composing academic texts: “composition is as much about reading as writing, as much about reading the world as the word, and as much about cultural production of ideas as the textual production of essays” (Mitchell 30).

For students who have experienced trauma, writing provides avenues to new ways of being in the world, new ways of understanding where they have been and where they are going. As tutor and accomplices, it is our privilege to be a part of that process.

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Writing Assistant Narrative—Spring 2015 Angie Saunders Tutoring, much like writing itself, involves the refinement of voice and style. Most writing assistants have probably cultivated, or are in the process of cultivating, their own personal tutoring style. Over the years, one tutoring style I’ve come to embrace is non-directive, or minimalist tutoring—at least to a point.

The goals in minimalist tutoring are to guide student writers to take control of their own work and to focus on building a better writer rather than a better paper. In “Minimalist Tutoring: Making Students Do All the Work,” Jeff Brooks states that “we need to make the student the primary agent in the writing center session” (2). Certainly, writing assistants are going to give attention to whatever assignment the student is working on, but according to minimalist tutoring, they should be thinking beyond that one essay or outline to a larger goal—encouraging the student to develop skills that will help them as a writer in the long term.

Writing assistants often bandy about terms like “higher order concerns” and “lower order concerns,” but sometimes, we lose sight of what those terms really mean.

We tend to focus on the immediate task at hand (the paper in front of us) and forget that there is something larger at stake—the long-term success of a student writer beyond that one paper. This can be especially true in an institution such as ours, because many of the students struggle with basic writing skills. In such cases, we might be tempted to become too directive or to assume the role of instructor. Brooks argues, “When you ‘improve’ a student’s paper, you haven’t been a tutor at all; you’ve been an editor. You may have been an ex5

ceedingly good editor, but you’ve been of little service to your student� (2). Putting more responsibility for what happens during a session into the hands of the student writer can empower them for future projects.

For example, I worked with a student last semester who told me he was grateful that I walked him through how to do things and then had him do it himself rather than simply fixing his problem for him.

On the other hand, students at this institution come from varying backgrounds. Some haven’t been in school for many years, while others might have spotty educational backgrounds. Some come from countries where English is not the native language. Given the sheer diversity of our student body, it can be problematic to adopt a one-size-fits-all tutoring style. Some students, particularly ESL students, might require a little more direction early on in the writing assistantstudent relationship. Minimalist tutoring can provide a framework, but ultimately writing assistants have to strive to find a balance between minimalist tutoring and the needs of our students here.

Minimalist tutoring can also provide a means of working with resistant students. I imagine most writing assistants have experienced a student walking in with an already-graded paper, or a paper that they plan to turn in ten minutes after they leave the Writing Center.

Often, they have no intention of making any changes on the paper or even looking at it again. Such students might have walked in hoping for validation, or wanting proof that they had walked through the door.

These sessions can be frustrating, but they can be salvaged. In such a case, a writing assistant could engage the student in a conversation about the process they went through in writing the paper, or issues they encounter when writing, in general. In other words, this 6

kind of session could provide an opportunity to focus on the writing process as a whole rather than just the one already-finished essay. Writing assistants can work toward building a better writer rather than a better paper.

In a perfect world, studio sessions can provide a good model for this approach to tutoring. This semester, I’ve been fortunate to have a studio session which is usually lively and productive. This particular class is filled with diverse personalities, so that creates some pretty colorful discussions. One thing that has been different this semester, is that I was able to take the students to a secondary location rather than meeting with them in the classroom itself. While this is not always possible due to space issues, I have found that it lessens distractions and facilitates a stronger focus on the sessions, which allows the students to take control of the process without feeling like they have to please an instructor.

As a writing assistant, it’s important that I actively write myself, so I have been focusing on writing both academically and creatively these past two semesters.

Presently, I am in the process of contributing player biographies to a planned book on women’s professional baseball. Creatively, I am storyboarding and editing several stories for publication. While these writings are not specifically geared toward the Writing Center itself, it helps me to add validity to my own writing credentials.

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The Inglorious Burden Ben Rafferty To utilize an old cliché, for the past few semesters, I have made a conscious effort to “see the forest for the trees.” When I first started working in the Writing Center, I felt burdened to make sure that every student walking away from a session with me was doing so with a perfect knowledge of everything wrong with their paper, a grand plan for how to improve it, or (most absurdly) a paper that they had already completely revamped with my “input.” While I quickly found out that this was impossible (though, embarrassingly, not as quickly as I should have), for a while, I still found it difficult to not at least mention everything they could do to make it better. Eventually, I realized that this line of thinking was, to put it mildly, flawed. In fact, it was pretty damn stupid. Once I realized this, I started to peel away at the layers of absurdity. This began with ensuring that I didn’t pile too much onto the students, and that I focused on the big picture; lowerorder concerns were only addressed if they impacted the big ideas, and only if the student was ready. As I noted in last year’s self-assessment of my work, I felt like I effectively implemented this way of thinking. But there was another key step to this “unburdening”: I needed to let students maintain control of their own papers. Always.

This, of course, seems obvious. It is not our job to rewrite students’ papers for them, and we are only there to help them “grow and develop.” The reality, however, is that it is one of the most common traps we fall into, especially at Stark State where so many of our students are “non-traditional,” to use the politically correct term. What this term really means (for us, at least) is 8

that our students often come in at a disadvantage. They often struggle with technology, critical thinking, or in many cases, even reading, issues that “traditional” students don’t usually have. This is through no fault of their own, but it is certainly their burden. And our instinct as tutors is to want to fix these problems, to do our best to help the student get ahead or catch up, burdening ourselves in the process. This often leads to that aforementioned desire to unload on the student every single thing that is wrong with the paper, in turn losing sight of the big picture, and frustrating students who already feel like they are drowning in a sea of information. It quickly becomes about the product, rather than the process, and undermines the Writing Assistant’s role in student development. In Jeff Brooks’ formative essay “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work,” he states that, “The moment we consider it our duty to improve the paper, we automatically relegate ourselves to the role of editor” (2). While Writing Center theory has evolved quite a bit since the publication of this work, the concepts within it remain ever-relevant, and the accusations painfully accurate.

While I had already begun the unburdening process by this point, reading “Minimalist Tutoring” last semester really solidified my intent to move even further away from that flawed thinking, and to really give control back to the students.

I feel that I have come a long way this year in terms of my tutoring style. While I can certainly say that I never edited a paper for a student (although some directive comments likely came close), I definitely felt the burden of having to “improve the paper.” Those days are long gone. My only goal now is that the student grows in some way as a result of a session, or at least that he or she feels more confident. This has been infinitely more productive (and less directive). I let students tell 9

me what they want help with, tell me what they’re struggling with. I use this as the basis for our discussion, instead of just where to start. I let them be the guide of the session, masters of their own fate. Granted, there is some wiggle room here. A lot of times students will ask about things that are more product-based than process-based. This might lead me to dig a little more so that they can learn how to ask the right questions.

But I only try to dig as deep as I feel the student is ready for. I won’t neglect any major problems I notice, but will focus mainly on what they feel needs work.

This is not easy, and it is a constant struggle to not just “give” the student those questions (or, god forbid, answers), but by being aware of it, I can continue to foster this attitude. Functionally, it amounts to sessions being more condensed, and with less overall information.

This keeps the students, and me, from feeling overwhelmed. By asking questions to pinpoint the real source of their current struggles, I can help set them on the path to overall self-improvement, a Jedi Master guiding them toward enlightenment instead of a Sith Lord spewing ideology and manipulating their brains toward my own concept of writing. This Zen-like confidence makes it easier to mitigate challenging sessions too: if a student is being difficult, or insists on “answers,” I just sit back and let him stew until he is ready to compromise and approach the paper on more constructive terms. However, more often that, letting students guide the session and maintain control of their thoughts (and work) makes both parties more at ease.

A prime example of this occurred recently when working with a student named Bev. Bev is one of our students who has been around for quite a while, and who struggles quite a bit, mostly with reading comprehension (not uncommon, especially at the Downtown Canton Satellite Campus). She was working on an article 10

critique, and the article was challenging: a complex academic paper, loaded with figures and jargon. She had not attempted a draft of the paper yet because she was having a hard time understanding the assignment’s questions, as well as the article itself (despite claiming to have “read it a couple times”). In the past, prior to my unburdening, I may have tried to go through the entire article with her, reading or skimming it line by line, and questioning her understanding at every step; then I’d have helped her come up with an outline for her paper, and finished off with a primer on APA formatting. Frankly, I’d have overloaded her. Instead, I focused only on the most urgent elements of her needs: understanding the article in general, and understanding/locating the assignment questions therein. I started by simply discussing it with her (“What didn’t make sense? What do you feel about it?

What do you know about the assignment?”). By doing this, I was able to get a better sense of where she was at. Then I asked her about the questions (“What are they actually saying? What do you really need to know?”), and gave her some hints as to where they might be located in the paper (“Usually you can find results in the abstract section, or the ‘results’ section…”), all the while letting her find these answers herself. If there was any point that she needed clarification on, I would help to the best of my abilities. I never made her feel like I was making her do work on her own, but that I was trying to accomplish it with her, when in reality I was just helping her find the tools she needed to come to her own conclusions. By the time we’d gone through the half the questions (of which there weren’t many), she already felt more confident about the assignment than when she walked in. By focusing on a small chunk (instead of a big bite), the burden of this heavy article had been lifted (slightly) from her back, and she could make some sense of it. All I did 11

was help her make the connections, and reword some things for her own comprehension. Was Bev suddenly an expert at reading academic articles? Heavens no.

But she had confidence, and she had some strategies to take into the future. By focusing on one element and building her confidence, I was able to offer a suggestion for what to work on next: drafting the paper. Giving her a specific task like this accomplished a few things: it gave her something clear to work on, gave her something to bring back in to the Writing Center for more help, and gave her control. She maintained control of her own assignment, and by extension her own destiny. This was a lot better than giving her a head full of things that would fall out as soon as she stepped away.

I wish I’d been doing this all along. I wish I’d never felt the need to “save” every student that came in. I wish I’d never given myself this ridiculous, unattainable goal. It would have saved me, and the students, a lot of headaches and heartaches. But now that I’ve started unburdening myself, I can try to give students the simplest thing that they’ve always needed most: a nudge in the right direction, or a spark to ignite their future.

I’ll let them handle the rest.

Work Cited Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991): 1-4. Print.

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Evaluation Narrative Cami Barber One thing I’ve noticed is how I ebb and flow through stock answers. As I was first getting my sea-legs in the center, I noticed myself saying the same thing to most students. “What is the one main idea you are trying to get across?” “What does your reader need to understand before you can get into the body of the essay?”

And so on. They became my familiar go-tos I always used. Once I got more comfortable with the work, I realized that stock answers could be hindering the help I gave students. Was I getting to the core of each student’s issue, or making the session easier for myself? So the next semester, instead of falling back on the same things I did over and over, I tried really hard to find different angles, use different phrases, and listen more to the students. And then… I found out I was STILL coming back to the same concepts over and over. But it seemed like that’s what most of the students I saw needed, and they did seem to feel more confident and ready to edit afterward. Still, I didn’t want to get stale, so the process of finding new approaches started again.

I try to keep an open mind and remind myself every shift to see the students with the freshest eyes I can, while also being confident that there are certain things many struggling writers need to be asked to find their way. And if I find myself feeling static in a session, I stop and get the student to talk more. Getting their words out in the open can help me find my own, fresh words to help them. I hope as I keep growing as a tutor, I will discover even more effective methods of helping students find their own writing legs.

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Personal Narrative and Self Assessment Corrie Tate Before I began in the writing center at Stark State College, I had worked in a writing center at another school. I believed it would be similar here. I was pleasantly surprised with each day. I am glad there is someone overseeing the writing center who is approachable and helpful. I am grateful for my mentor who was always available, but never invasive or presumptuous. I am glad for the variety of tutors and the myriad of strengths they represent. I am grateful for the opportunity to help students with such diverse needs.

When I began tutoring, I would see the surface of needs for the students. Many students would come in with a specific idea of what to expect and what they were seeking from the experience. This would come in many forms. Some students would come simply as a class requirement. Many times this student does not want any notes on the paper because they no longer have time to fix it. They are here simply for the documentation showing they have attended. This student may or may not be open to advice. I have learned that each student who walks through the door deserves the same “full service� approach. This student may not have the time to make particular changes to the paper they brought. However, they may be given the opportunity to revise the draft. In this instance, they may appreciate the advice for the draft they will be working on soon. They may have a strong draft already, but lack the confidence to present it. Sometimes the student can benefit as much from the confidence building as they 14

can the grammar lesson. It is important to try to see beyond the simple reason stated for the visit and know they may benefit in other ways.

One recent example was a student from my studio session. She would participate in the studio sessions and had solid content. She struggled with grammar and her instructor asked her to seek help in the writing center.

She was further behind with her papers than was let on. She came to the writing center and I was able to meet with her. She was in tears as she was realizing where she stood in the class. I was able to meet with her about her grammatical concerns, but I was also able to help her with her confidence and her desire to fight for her academic career. During the next studio, the instructor thanked me for my work with her and noted that I likely saved her semester. She took far more than the grammar lesson from our meeting and was able to find her desire for success once again.

While not every student comes in with additional needs, the relationships we build with the students allow them to see us as mentors, role models, and friends. This connection can mean the world to a student and can help shape their academic career. The student who felt overwhelmed when he walked into the writing center may find relief in knowing there is someone he can trust in the writing center. The relationships forged in studio sessions during a freshman semester can be the reason a student is willing to trust advice as a junior. These relationships can be the reason a student chooses to fight through a rough patch and remain enrolled. Our role in the writing center becomes more than just explaining the rules of comma 15

usage; we become an ally. More often than not, our repeat students are not continuing to come in because they seek an answer to APA formatting. Many are seeking a friend. Particularly in a community college, a relationship with a tutor can mean finally achieving a sense of community, belonging, and acceptance to the student who may not have a place to turn for academic support at home. Keeping this need in my heart allows me to help the student who comes in for the fourth week in a row to ask the same question about using a header. She may be here for a much more important answer to a much larger question. We need to remember the student is our first priority and we should continue to form these bonds as long as the student continues to need. At times we feel overwhelmed with appointments, but our time can mean much more to the student than the 30 minutes we set aside.

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Strugglin’ in the Studio: Authority and Participation in Group Sessions Daniel Beall During studio session, I’ve heard some awful things.

Students read papers about abuse, gang violence, disease, and carnage of all kinds. Brutal honesty often reigns, and motives and personalities are laid bare.

Touchy situations should be handled deftly by the writing assistant (WA), and often are. However, in some classes, brutal honesty can be toxic, and affect the group dynamic in a way that can make both students and the WA approach studio session with feelings of dread. I’m speaking of course about the student that we’ve all met, who I will call the non-participant (NP).

The NP who will plainly state, during the climax of a student’s narrative about their father’s cancer, “I hate studio session.” This is the same student who when asked to join the group will say bluntly, “I don’t have time for this” and turn their eyes back to their computer screen, where a riveting game of Crystal Penguins is slogging towards an inevitable conclusion. A student’s participation level and often rude approach to studio session is something that becomes a factor in any semester, at any time. A seasoned WA’s confidence can be shaken by these situations, especially if one has had many a successful studio experience.

The NP is the student many WAs fear, and perhaps secretly detest. And why not? Studio not only makes the student vulnerable, but the poor, hapless WA as well. There is more at stake here than simple participation. When one falls, the effect can be contagious. I be17

lieve that there is basically one factor at play in the studio session paradigm: authority, and would humbly offer some suggestions to newer writing assistants and instructors who struggle with the concept of studio and the NP’s relationship to the writing center.

When I first began working here, I believed that if my students in the studio session wanted to schedule appointments in the writing center, then they should probably schedule with someone who they haven’t worked with in order to get different kinds of feedback and so forth. I no longer believe that this is the case.

Mandatory visits to the writing center for most English classes are essential, but it isn’t just important that they go, it is important when they go, and initially, who they go see. I have found that students that come early on, say the first 6 weeks of an IAW class, and schedule with their studio facilitator, are more likely to engage in a few specific behaviors. For one, the student will return to studio session with the impression, often shared with other students, that the writing center is a valuable tool. This feeling will begin to extend to studio session. Secondly, the student, having worked with the writing assistant that runs their studio session, will tend to have more respect for the individual facilitator and participate more openly. For the new writing assistant, I say encourage students to work with you specifically, and take it very seriously. To the instructor, I say send the students to the WC early (for their first paper).

Who knows? The student may return. But this is only what we can do outside of the session, and outside of the classroom.

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Inside the classroom, as one day a week is dedicated to studio session, it should be framed as “studio session day” rather than a “lab day” or “work on your papers day” or whatever else an instructor might call that loneliest of days, where the students are expected to stand on their own two feet. This leads to a certain implied necessity of the studio session and lends it authority. This authority can be reinforced at the beginning of the semester, where a WA and instructor can go over familiar NP excuses and try to explain the session’s purpose and function. Undoubtedly, the students will also look at the WA as an authority. They are aware that this WA is someone employed by the college in some capacity, obviously. Unfortunately, when the WA lessens that authority through facilitation, which is one goal of studio session, the students often begin to lose respect for the WA. This is, in my belief, because the students associate power with top-down “banking” approaches, whereas a facilitator is inherently not so top-down. The WA must find ways to maintain a level of respect from the students while continuing to act as a simple facilitator. This is why a student’s writing center experiences are key to studio session success. Another way (used in tandem) to do this is by eliminating the concept of authority all together, and there are strategies to use to do this.

Location is extremely important. One of the fears of an instructor is that the students might be misled in some way, unlearned, and so the instructor must be on hand, must be useful. Misinformation happens, sometimes, but should not happen if the WA has had open communication with the instructor regarding expectations.

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Also, the WA shouldn’t be giving much assignment information anyways, but probing the student’s understanding of the assignment and the student’s ideas. In the end, in all situations, I believe it is essential that the students are outside of the classroom. This is both to expand their definitions of “where learning happens”, and to give them a certain freedom that they may not feel they have when the teacher is listening in. This sometimes leads to sessions that are outright filled with complaint, often about the assignment, often about the instructor. The WA of course doesn’t agree, just simply understands and solicits feelings and feedback from others in the group. We challenge the concept of authority by simply participating in these sessions as a neutral character.

Hold on, you might say. How does this get the NP to participate? Say you’re doing what you think is right, and you’ve still got a student on the fringe. I would suggest that if the studio session is taking up a day of the week, but the students have no consequences, we are already doomed. To instructors creating a syllabus, I believe it is totally essential that studio session make up a significant amount of points for the semester, say 10-15 out of 100. These points could be, by and large, “free” points except in the case of total, unchanging NP, in which case, the student will lose some or all of those points. I can hear instructors balking at this already. Consider that studio session makes up a percentage of total class time for the semester, and that time should be valuable, but most importantly valued.

As the total antithesis to a banking approach, we are already asking students to do something that makes 20

them terrifically uncomfortable. However, we aren’t showing its value with a grade. Studio is not participation in the sense of simply raising one’s hand or paying attention. It involves sustained activity. To undervalue this activity makes an impression on the student, and we have lost the NP before the real work has even started.

In the end, that is what studio is. Real work. It isn’t an exercise in public speaking, or a training session on compliment sandwiches. It requires a student to express an authentic self while taking control of their own education, and the education of their peers. It creates authority, allows a student to become authority. To achieve this end, we must constantly be in the process of building and erasing, building and erasing, again and again, our own authority.

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Reading Downtown: Literacy Building and Potential ESL Overlap Emilia Kandl In the Downtown Writing Center, we talk about illiteracy on a daily basis – particularly in recent semesters, when our student body has increasingly dwindled and many of the students who remain are ones who seem to have “slipped through the cracks” without basic literacy skills or the facilities or resources to gain them.

We worry about our role in addressing this, and when we discuss it it’s usually in reference to the composing process: “So-and-so and I worked on writing sentences today.” Tutoring at this level can be frustrating, certainly, as well as rewarding. Andrew did a good job of summing up the mixed emotions we can have at the end of the workday: if all we accomplished was teaching someone what periods are, we can leave feeling a little discouraged; on the other hand, we can look at teaching periods as a pretty big achievement, opening up a world of sentence-writing the student couldn’t access before.

For most of my four years at Stark State, I’ve chosen to work exclusively in the Downtown Center; this has enabled me to evolve my tutoring specifically to meet the needs of its smaller, largely nontraditional and disadvantaged student population and alerted me to ways we can better accommodate these students. Through this, my view of what constitutes successful tutoring has undergone a lot of readjustment – I see success much more as an ongoing process than something confined to individual sessions. And through this largerpicture view, I often wonder if I’m taking the right approach not only to helping students with each assignment, but to building their overall literacy. I can feel 22

underqualified to do this – especially with students at the lowest reading levels and with learning disabilities – but as I’m inevitably involved, I’m constantly trying to learn as I go. The past year has brought some potentially very useful insights.

In Writing Centers in general, of course, there is a lot of talk of process over product, making better writers over better papers, etc. Helping a student to create sentence boundaries using periods is a step in a process: a step that also helps increase the likelihood of a student with many difficulties having a physical essay to hand in by the due date (a product). It is challenging to prioritize when students need help at literally every stage of essay production – opening up a Word document to type the essay and sounding/spelling out words, along with gathering and organizing ideas – and for time’s sake, we generally have to focus on the essay at hand and what can be learned during its execution. Especially since we see so many of our students on a repeat basis (often over several semesters and years, as well as weeks), we hope to help build writing skills over time this way. And we do – if usually quite slowly and with a lot of backtracking.

Papers are constantly due and must be written; meanwhile, building the students’ reading skills is a more sporadic, elusive and, in some ways, trickier undertaking. In class, Reader Response assignments are introduced gradually during the time when students are writing personal essays before transitioning into research papers. At any point in this timeline, students may be expected to read, evaluate, and construct essays around articles and other materials in their non-English classes, and often they are extremely unprepared to do so.

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Last semester, I had many sessions that played out along almost identical lines: a student working on a paper for a Social Sciences course would ask for help with formatting or making a Reference page, and I’d see that the student had unwittingly plagiarized most of the paper. Some students believed they’d used their own words because they’d removed or changed the author’s words to create improperly transcribed, often nonsensical sentences. When I asked about the meaning of what they’d transcribed, they seemed baffled.

The students knew they had to use information from sources in their papers, but they couldn’t make sense of what they were hastily reading and inserted the information without taking care to reread, explain, or give it context, assuming this would be sufficient to fulfill the assignment.

Most of these sessions occurred a few minutes before the paper was due, so we had time only to put most of it in quotation marks. I would warn the student about plagiarism, point out that if we removed the quoted parts – someone else’s words – there wasn’t really a paper left, and encourage the student to ask for help earlier in the process of writing future, similar papers.

Cases where the student did come back or we had more time for these assignments turned into a handful of my most rewarding sessions this year. We could read through the sources together, clarifying or discussing points the student didn’t understand or found interesting, and the student could rephrase or respond to what we were reading – usually they could relate it to their own lives and had many opinions. I could then show them how to use this give-and-take to construct their paper, and they seemed to become less overwhelmed and enjoy the process of writing more.

One of the most important things this showed these 24

students was the amount of time they had to spend on assignments like this, or at least on the preliminary reading they’d overlooked before. And since many of them struggled with comprehending the source material, it let them know it was a good idea ask for help before the point when they needed to complete the paper.

It occurred to me that I haven’t had this specific type of “emergency” session as often over writing-course assignments; plagiarism isn’t a big issue with Reader Responses, and by Research Paper time the students have been intensely warned against plagiarizing. Still, more often than not, the students don’t fully grasp how they need to read (or even that they need to read) for these assignments in enough time to properly do so.

We have reading-related conversations over Englishclass assignments, of course – but perhaps not always as intensely as we should, at the Reader Response level in particular. One student we’ve seen for a few years entered College Composition last semester. She has learning disabilities and trouble with differentiating letters, forming words and sentences, using capital letters and periods, and recalling ideas, as well as with typing, finding, and saving documents. Personal essaywriting was still a difficult process for her at the point when she received her first Reader Response assignment, which for a while seemed insurmountable: she let the due date go further and further by and didn’t turn it in, unable to collect thoughts on what she’d read.

Eventually, I sat down and read the essay with the student. We went very slowly, stopping to discuss each paragraph, and I was impressed by her paraphrasing.

She wrote her summary in the Center while it was fresh in her mind – I asked her what it was about, she typed, and we made spelling corrections. She returned 25

for a session where we discussed her thoughts on The Andy Griffith Show, which she remembered watching, and she explained her process of understanding the essay: she hadn’t understood why the author was talking about multiple shows, but after our careful reading, she saw he was using comparisons to make his point about Andy Griffith. She hadn’t typed any of this; I jotted down everything she said, and in another session she and Ben referred to the notes as she typed.

We’ve found over multiple sessions that it benefits this student when we sit and read with her. It shows her that she needs to do this, for one thing – otherwise, she tends to only partially read. Of course, it also helps because she struggles with basic reading comprehension – but in many cases, the high-level students seem to have the same problem. A couple weeks ago, I worked with a College Comp student who tends to write strong essays; while we talked about how to summarize an article she’d selected, it became clear that she hadn’t read it closely and had missed the author’s purpose and argument. We read through the article together so she could identify these things, and she realized why she’d been having trouble writing about the article before: she hadn’t taken the time to make sure she understood it.

I think we tend to make assumptions about students’ reading comprehension, at all levels, and especially as we are the Writing Center, we encourage them to read independently so we can make time to discuss their thoughts and help these thoughts get onto the page. But we can underestimate how much help students need with this first step, to a surprising extent: if they can’t spell out words or form sentences, why would we assume they can even basically read, much less comprehend what they’ve read? It may not be our job to cultivate reading as much as writing skills (and with students 26

who come in at the lowest literacy levels, as I said, we may not be entirely qualified to do so) – but if we don’t occasionally model the time it takes to read something and work on comprehending it before starting to write, some students won’t grasp this. This means they will have a great deal of trouble completing their early assignments with reading components, possibly without knowing why; and at the Research Paper level, this only becomes a much bigger problem.

In the Downtown Center, where our student body is smaller, we generally have time to do some reading with students. The students’ time is less flexible; furthermore, while they may be happy to have lengthy sessions over their writing, reading isn’t usually what they expect to do with us. Frequently, students come in for help with their Reader Responses, only to tell us they haven’t done the reading yet. At this point, we’ll often discuss the assignment and encourage students to return once they have read. But we may not do enough to drive in the (seemingly obvious) point that the student missed entirely – much of the work that goes into a Reader Response assignment must be devoted to reading. Students also come in when they’ve hastily read or read but not understood; there is more we can do at this point, but in many of these instances, I suspect it would help if we showed them earlier on what the process of reading looks like.

One person who’s spent a lot of time reading with us over the past year is Domingo, who isn’t enrolled as a student but is studying through the ABLE program for the GED. He was referred to us for help, and we regularly work with him between sessions. His goal is to pass the test in English, his third language; he was raised in Guatemala with minimal formal schooling.

He has spent several hours of nearly every day at the 27

school over the past two semesters, working to build his English (and general) reading skills using all resources at his disposal – workbooks, the dictionary, the internet, and us – and he’s made substantial progress.

Recently, he’s learning to write essays evaluating argumentative tactics in the passages he reads. It took a long time to get to this point, and still, each time he reads a new passage there are numerous obstacles to comprehending it – vocabulary he hasn’t encountered yet, cultural reference points he doesn’t have, conversational expressions he’s never heard, or simply confusing syntax.

I’ve realized that many of our students enter the college at levels similar to Domingo’s (or lower) in English reading comprehension, and since they also have to learn to write essays, we generally aren’t able devote a fraction of the same attention to their process of overcoming this. Occasionally, students will come in with assignments from Critical Analysis; this allows us to focus on discussing vocabulary, context clues, etc. Not much progress can be made in a single session of this type, but I often think about how many small steps, comparable to period-learning, we could make over many such sessions with each student. This may not be feasible at the moment; however, there are likely ways we could do more to work the building of reading comprehension skills into our everyday tutoring.

I decided to attend the NEOWCA conference this year, even though I wasn’t presenting, and one experience made it especially worthwhile. During one session I went to a Kent presentation entitled, “Different Cultures, Different ‘House Rules’” that looked at helping students from different cultural backgrounds adhere to American academic writing standards while also developing their own voice. The presenters had ESL stu28

dents in mind as a starting point but had planned for a group discussion, and the small group who attended brought a surprisingly wide variety of experiences with students not coming from Standard American English backgrounds. In this context, we talked about balancing directive and nondirective tutoring, encouraging students to use the Writing Center while also building their autonomy, and building Englishlanguage literacy and American cultural literacy, among other topics. I found myself applying much of my Downtown experience to this conversation, leading me to consider the amount of overlap in tutoring ESL students and our students.

In my self-assessment narrative from my first year at Stark State, I expressed a wish to learn more about ESL tutoring after having a couple of ESL sessions at the Main Campus. In the time I’ve spent Downtown, however, I’ve done little to no ESL tutoring until very recently; we had several sessions last Summer with student from Spain, and Domingo arrived last Fall. The work I’ve done with these students has been focused on building overall English literacy – reading as well as writing skills – and has renewed my interest in learning more about ESL tutoring methods, especially as similar approaches might be applied to building students’ overall literacy Downtown.

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Different Jess Lytwyn In February this year, I made the “mid-life crisis” move from a traditional 9-5 desk job back to waiting tables and picking up more on-campus hours here with Stark State.

The decision was a long time coming, but it was still hard to jettison all my doubts and leave what is considered normal and comfortable. So far, this change is the best thing that has happened to me in quite some time. My stress level is nowhere near where it was a year ago. I love my hours, and I have accepted that I am really good at what I do…and that’s okay. That does not mean, however, that this has been easy. In fact, the adjustment taking place halfway through the semester has not only been difficult on me, but it has definitely been tough for my peers as well.

I always feel that it’s necessary to explain what “normal and comfortable” meant to me since most people love to ask me, “What does normal mean, anyway?” Frankly, I had an idyllic childhood. I grew up in a great western suburb of Cleveland, am the oldest of three children, and have amazing parents. My parents were high school sweethearts, marrying at the age of twenty two right after finishing college. They have been happily married for 35 years and are definitely each other’s best friend. Two years after marriage, I graced them with my presence, followed two years later by my brother, and two years after that, my sister. Sounds a little too “Norman Rockwell” for the average person? It gets better.

My brother married his high school sweetheart and has 30

three beautiful children of his own. My sister, believe it or not, also married her high school sweetheart and has an incredible son. As if all this wasn’t cute enough, they all (parents included) live one street away from each other in the same neighborhood, built their houses, and work every weekend on household projects to continuously update and upgrade. Gag me, right? I joke, but I’m sure you can see where this whole idea of “normal” is coming from. I’ve always felt like a bit of a “black sheep” of the family. While I have been with Jesse for almost 12 years, we aren’t married and aren’t really planning on marrying any time soon. I have, what I consider, a step-daughter who only just moved in with us last April, but who has also transformed so completely to healthy, intelligent and confident throughout this past year. In fact, she’s graduating in May and has been dating a very nice, well-balanced young man. I also found out a few years ago that I likely would not have children naturally. I live in a semi-updated 1973 bi-level, and I have no idea how to cut a piece of lumber. I always had this vision of what my life should be, but it has taken me a while to be okay with what I have and what I am.

Learning to accept myself has been about a decade long work-in-progress, maybe longer if I really think on it.

Most days are good, but I still have a tendency to fall into old habits of getting down on myself. The truth is, I have a pretty amazing life too. Is it different? Sure, but it’s mine. Moving from the traditional career path helped me realize that I only get one go-around at this thing called life, and I really want to make the most of it. Cliché? Perhaps, but I love the freedom that has 31

come along with finally accepting where I am, and more importantly accepting who I am.

That being said, I am still working out the details of the schedule. Confession: my schedule has been the most difficult part of my life transition. It’s not so much the hours themselves as finding the balance between all of the projects and jobs I want to accomplish. I feel like I wasted so much of my time sitting behind a computer desk for 40+ hours per week (and missed out on living) that I just want to do everything. Right. Now. I know I’ve had a number of conflicts with my work schedule this semester, and the long and short of this story is that I have every intention of improving this aspect of my life by the time the fall semester is back underway in August. I still feel a bit like I am going through the motions of my life, but I am finally taking some time for self-reflection and analysis. Because I will have some time away from working as much (with the summer coming up), I know that I will be able to be more realistic about what I can truly do with my schedule without overcommitting myself. My peers, both online and on-campus, have been extremely tolerant, helpful, and supportive through this move. I might not have been as successful as I feel now had I not had the backing from my colleagues.

All-in-all, I can truly say that I am happy and moving toward contentment. I wish that words could capture the thanks I want to give to everyone that has remained steadfast throughout this process. I have room for improvement, as we all do, but I am really looking forward to simply enjoying my life.

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Untitled Jon Silvey In the past year I have learned much about myself as a teacher and a tutor. Several bits of what I have gleaned have simply been reaffirmed. First off, my capability to adapt has shone this past year. Between juggling several jobs, classes, or simply switching shifts to better accommodate myself and the students, adaptability has been a close companion. I have learned that my skills with all students, but especially that of ESL, can always be further honed. Another thing I have learned is that while we may stretch ourselves thin for extended periods of time, we must remember to relax from time to time or bitterness will fill in where flexibility once was.

I wish I knew more grammar coming into my position at Stark State College. I do not wish I knew this so I could drill the students who come into the center or those in my classroom. Language can act like a machine and we are the mechanics. It is not so important to be able to name every piece that comprises the device, but it is important to know the way it all functions together. Knowing more than I did coming into this career would have better prepared me to deal with introductory students as well as ESL students with far greater ease.

The two main skills I have acquired since starting here tie into each other nicely: confidence and knowledge.

One does not automatically feed into the other, but in the case of teaching and tutoring they certainly do.

Simply the doing of something can grow one’s confidence, but being able to explain the why of it is where true power comes. Something I have lost during my time here is my naivety. I entered into academia believ33

ing that if I simply tried hard enough, got good grades, got the right degrees, and kept pushing on that I could make a good enough employee to obtain a fulltime job.

There is so much more to it than that. In some cases one must be friends with the right person or married to them in order to advance. In others one must be specialized to a need of the school one is attempting to gain employment. Other times one must simply be lucky. One way or another, simple hard work and intelligence is not enough.

I have mostly been reading light fantasy novels as of late. Grad school beat some of the joy of reading out of me, but I have been dabbling into some Writing Center administration pieces as my love of centers has not been chased away. I think that all of the authors have one thing in common: the ability to adapt to the needs of their surroundings. I love that concept. Everyone has to adapt in some way, shape, or form and this holds so true when we teach. Each student is individual, so why not make our approach as such?

There is a student who I will simply refer to as Gator.

He is an older, non-traditional marine that I had the pleasure of not only teaching and tutoring, but befriending. He taught me so much about what it is to hold authority over a class, to not give that authority up, and how to share it with the students. His iron will and raw emotionality will never be forgotten. Knowing that part of the reason he tries so hard to do his best is to make me proud because of what I have taught him is something I cannot shake and never want to.

In my time at Stark I have become more directive than I have ever been. This is certainly a quality that can be a disservice to our students. I often have to remind myself to keep asking questions so that the students can 34

learn on their own and to be ever patient when they do not see the light. This affects me in the sense that I need to slow the pragmatist inside me. Many times this is what the student WANTS, but certainly not what the student NEEDS.

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Untitled Katelynne Shepard Over the past year, what I already thought to be true about online tutoring has been driven home even more.

Connecting with students in a significant way is much harder in the online atmosphere but not impossible.

The main problem with teaching writing online is that a chat box obviously doesn’t give you any room to send or receive nonverbal cues. This makes getting a feel for where the student is coming from and their emotional state much harder and can make engaging them in the session a challenge. However, there are some strategies that can make it easier to get the student involved in an online session.

1. Ask open-ended questions. We've all had those sessions where it seems like the student can't type more than four letters at a time: "yeah," "no," "idk," "ok," etc.

Asking open-ended questions eliminates this — or at least reduces it greatly. It's also important to stay away from questions that have a definite yes/no, right/ wrong answer. The students have a 50/50 chance of being wrong, which can quickly make them lose confidence and become discouraged.

2. Make the content relative. Possibly the most frustrating part of the student experience is not understanding why the subject matter is important: "But I'm never going to need to do this in real life!" Sometimes, the student is totally correct, but it's relatively easy to explain to a student how important solid written communication skills are. Most of our students are going into health care or other technical professions. Talking about leaving coherent chart notes and being able to write emails and memos to superiors and peers are two 36

possible strategies to get the student to buy into the session.

3. Empathize. Feeling like you are understood, heard and valued is an extremely important part of any interpersonal experience, including a tutoring session taking place in a virtual environment. Always take the student's "pulse" at the beginning of the session. Adding a simple "How are you doing today?" to your greeting is enough. Pay attention to whether the student says "Great! Just got to grab my slip, and I'm done for the day!" or "OMG finals are tomorrow, and I'm FREAKING out!!!!" If a student is upset or frustrated, recognize that this is a valid feeling and offer to help. It can be as simple as "Wow! That does sound stressful : ( Let's see if I can help." This can go an especially long way with those students who just seem determined to not do or say anything during the session. It helps for them to know we are real people on the other side of the screen and we've been there!

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Writing Assistant Narrative of Katie O’Brien Katie O’Brien One fortunate outcome of my chaotic personal life is it led me to take on a new tutoring assignment in the Online Writing Center. When I taught at a community college in 2003-2007, we were just beginning to dabble in online education. At that time, I was rewarded with grant funding when I moved classes to online or hybrid formats. The literature of online pedagogy was in its early stages, and faculty skeptics were still trying to prove face-to-face instruction was the superior form of learning. My college didn’t know yet that effective online education called for a different teaching style.

You couldn’t simply post the same notes and assignments from a face-to-face course and get the same outcome. If students weren’t engaged with the website multiple times a week, they simply forgot about the class and failed due to missed deadlines.

Ten years ago, large-scale online education was still in its infancy. Random courses were offered here and there, but many colleges and universities failed to have a cohesive plan to offer entire degree programs online.

There wasn’t a need for each institution to offer its own online tutoring. The few online students who needed this option could be outsourced to third parties such as Smartthinking, and technology grants were still offsetting this cost. However, as online education grew and continues to grow, student services, including tutoring, have seen the need to create online counterparts.

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Online tutoring makes sense for a commuter campus like Stark State College because our large population of non-traditional students doesn’t always have the luxury of coming to campus early or staying late. Instead, they are rushing to campus from a job or rushing home to get kids off the bus. Now that I’m a parent, I appreciate the reality that 10 p.m. may be your first chance to sit down and concentrate on your own schoolwork, and online tutoring provides that flexibility.

My first online teaching experience was mediocre at best, and I found my hybrid graduate courses to be less engaging than the face-to-face ones. I fully recognize that my personal bias is for face-to-face instruction and tutoring. I don’t think I ever would have pursued work as an online tutor, but the need for geographic flexibility made this an option I was suddenly willing to consider.

What I’ve learned as an online tutor is that the teachback is crucial. In a face-to-face tutoring session, you have body language to help you assess whether a concept is resonating with a student. Online, there are no such cues. You can’t hear the sighs, watch the eyes well up with tears, or see the blank expressions which indicate confusion. Instead, you have to rely on what your tutee tells you. “Does that make sense?” is an ineffective question for the online tutor. Instead, when it comes to grammar and punctuation, I find it’s best if I find an example and show the correction and then challenge the student to find a similar error and provide his or her own correction. We keep looking at examples until I’m satisfied that the student can identify the error and make the correction independently.

I find error analysis is much easier to teach online than it is in-person. In a face-to-face session, it’s so easy to 39

get sucked in to a grading role where you find all the errors, and frankly, many students want their tutors to serve as proofreads who “fix everything.” When the tutor and tutee meet in a space where they are not staring at the same copy of a paper, the temptation to add commas and periods lessens.

Because lower-order concerns are so tedious to tutor online (“You need some punctuation after the word ‘twelve’ in the third line of the second paragraph on page three”), it’s easier to keep conversations focused on higher- order concerns, unless of course the paper is due in two hours! I find myself brainstorming with students to draw out examples or further develop ideas. Part of the reason I think I do this more online is because I want the student engaged at all times. If I find an example is weak, I’ll challenge the student to give me more detail while I’m reading the rest of the paper. This way the student isn’t as tempted to check Facebook while they’re waiting for me to finished reading the paper.

For me, one lesson learned that can be applied to inperson tutoring is the usefulness of having a second copy of a draft. When I tutor online, I often have a chance to read the entire paper before working with its author. When I tutored on campus, I always read drafts in front of the student which was a nerveracking experience for the author. Unfortunately, the nature of walk-in tutoring necessitates disengaging from the tutee to read the paper, and this happens early in the session. However, when the tutor and tutee both have a copy of the paper, the tutor can identify an area for the tutee to begin revising, such as citation format, while the tutor reads the rest of the paper. This way, the student is engaged throughout and is less selfconscious while the tutor reads. Additionally, more 40

work can be done if the student begins revising while the tutor is still reading, and there’s the additional bonus of the tutor being available but disengaged so it’s less likely the tutor will be lured into a complete handholding session.

Because I can’t rely on nonverbal cues and feel like I lose a lot of the session to typing delays (as opposed to the speed of face-to-face conversation), I sometimes worry that I’m too directive in my online tutoring. I can’t let students flounder as long online as they try to figure things out. I don’t write the corrections for students I tutor in-person. Instead, I might explain a citation format or show a sample page in a handbook, but I make the tutee write the correction and watch for errors.

This is harder to do online when I can’t look over someone’s shoulder. Often I direct students to their comp. handbook or the Purdue OWL for an example. I then ask what they notice is different between their format and the sample’s. I keep asking the “what is different” question until everything’s covered, but there often reaches a point where the tutee simply doesn’t notice. This is when I become directive, and I often type the first full sample citation we work on together so the student can see the spacing and punctuation to use as a model. I don’t, however, provide more than one complete citation. Now that I write this, maybe I’m not as directive as I thought I was being.

Though I’d make the student write/type the sample citation in the Writing Center, the “what is different” questioning is more engaging than simply whipping out a handbook and me checking on what is different.

Though I didn’t learn this at Stark State, the most im41

pactful thing I’ve done to structure my tutoring sessions and make them tutee driven is new to me since the last time I worked here. At the Cleveland Clinic, I sat in on a patient-centered communication course for nurses. A large portion of the course was role-playing.

Since I didn’t work with patients, I adapted the model to tutoring and found during the course that 90% of the model works seamlessly for tutors. Here’s the model in a nutshell:    



   



Establish rapport Ask how you can help (elicit concerns) Ask “What else?”

Keep asking “What else” until the patient/tutee exhausts his or her list Note: Asking “anything else” signals to the listener that you’ll only allow one more concern and should not be used.

Summarize the concerns, set an agenda, and seek agreement from the tutee If concerns are longer than appointment time, briefly explain what can be accomplished today and note opportunity to schedule followup appointment for remaining concerns Work through the concerns Use the “teach-back” model to test understanding Have tutee tell you list of next steps as a way of summarizing the session Ask if all concerns have been addressed—provide an answer or resource for each, including followup appointment Thank tutee; schedule follow-up if necessary

Over time, I’ve learned to avail myself of the need to address everything that could be corrected in a paper.

The “what else?” questioning works beautifully. I’ve found since I started using it this year, students are giving me a more specific list of concerns than “just checking to see if everything’s OK.” That specific list more 42

than fills the tutoring appointment, and I believe it improves tutee satisfaction with the tutoring session when we review the concerns and an action to address each. Occasionally I still jump in with a reminder to double space throughout and indent paragraphs, but overall, my sessions are much more student-driven than they were in the past.

One recommendation I make to you, Leah, is to provide stretch assignments to your tutors who are considering careers tutoring or writing centers. The pedagogy of online tutoring is different than face-to-face, and having experience with both will make future writing center directors more effective and thoughtful in how they train their tutors and structure both formats.

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Untitled Kellie Thompson Completing this narrative puts me in the same place as our students in the Stark State Writing Program. We are asked to write something and hope that it is acceptable to the individual who set the parameters of the assignment. This past year has served as a reminder year for me. Frankly, the year leading into this academic year, I have been suffering from tutor burnout. Like writing is a challenge for some of our students, this past year has been challenge, for me, to do the job of a tutor. Most days were seen as a struggle and I did what I needed to do in order to complete the Studio Session, move down to the Writing Center, and get through whatever assignments came my way.

The 2014-2015 semesters had me at the Main Campus as well as The Armory in Barberton. My interactions with the students slowly aided in my overcoming burnout. I will honesty say that I am not 100% back from this, but the students this semester truly helped more than they know. The three classes I tutored over the course of the year had students who wanted to learn and wanted to share their stories.

When I started four years ago, I wish I would have been told about the trauma our students carry with them, and that they are looking for an outlet. I wish I would have been told, as someone with two humanities degrees, you will most likely be ill equipped to help or even understand. I wish I would have been told 44

as someone with two humanities degrees, you will most likely be ill equipped to help or even understand.

I wish I would have been told that some days will be spent teaching nontraditional adult students basic reading, writing, and educational skills. Some days, you will spend wondering what you are doing here and if any of it is even worth doing. Then, I run across a student in my afternoon Barberton Studio Session. He is an admitted felon who spent most of his life in jail for trafficking and other various federal crimes. He is a gifted storyteller with a passion and drive to better not only his life but revitalize his neighborhood. He admits his past mistakes and recognizes that what he wants will be an uphill battle. He is one of the very few who make tutoring worth doing.

I truly don’t know what I have “lost� this semester, but I have gained a new perspective on locations like Barberton. I might not always like the drive there, the freezing rooms, or the constant sound of metal cutting while trying to tutor, but it has been nice to step away from the Main Campus.

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Reflective Narrative Morgan Cole There are many things I wish I would have known before I started at the SSC Writing Center, such as that it is always below 30 degrees in the WC; Rob Balla has a weird obsession with cats; Dan brings in whole roasted chickens in Ziploc bags; and the job can make one so crazy that it is easy to go to work with two different shoes on or forget their shoes altogether (ahem Rachel). Had I known of these issues, I may have reconsidered taking the position. Thankfully, Leah occasionally brings in baked goods, which makes up for some of the above mentioned issues. Although, it has been awhile since we have had any baked goods in here, so hint-hint, wink-wink, Leah. I would prefer something with chocolate.

What I really wish that I would have known before starting at the writing center is that it is not about being perfect. It is not about knowing every APA citation or every grammar rule or about every student with whom I work receiving an A plus on his or her paper.

Nor is it about being able to tackle every writing issue a student has in one session or about having the same opinion or suggestion about writing a paper as every other writing assistant or teacher. I have, however, realized that is important to be adaptable to the students’ needs, to be open to different ideas and methods, to be realistic about what can be accomplished in a short amount of time, and to not be afraid to collaborate and ask co-workers for help when I don’t know.

When I first started, I really enjoyed, as I still do, hearing the students’ stories and helping guide them in their writing process. It is so rewarding to see the light 46

bulb go on when an idea or a concept finally clicks or make sense for them. In the beginning though, I remember feeling very overwhelmed when I would encounter a question or issue that I was not sure of like a complicated APA citation or a certain computer format issue. I also once remember feeling terrible because I gave a student a suggestion during a studio session, and she wrote in reflective letter how my advice was opposite from what the instructor had told her. I was worried I had failed that student. What if she received a poor grade because she followed my advice? I started to notice that I had heard a couple other students mention the same issue about me or other writing assistants. How do I/we keep straight what every instructor prefers? I wondered if I was doing something wrong or if maybe I was not qualified enough for the job. However, the following semester, the same instructor announced in the beginning of the class that it was okay if I or another writing assistant or even a classmate gave them different advice or suggestions. He explained that we all have different ideas, and it is up to the author of the paper to take ownership and decide what suggestions to use. Shortly after, I overheard another instructor telling a student the same idea. I realized that I was encouraging the students to be open to all the suggestions and decide which ones to take or incorporate during studio sessions, but I was failing to include myself in that category.

Because I am the “writing assistant,” I felt that I had to have the perfect suggestion and be a mind reader to come up with the same suggestion their instructor would have for them. However, now I realize that is not the case. Although I realize that I am considered more of an “expert” than the students are, and I know I am responsible to guide and assist the students with their writing needs, I now know that differing opinions 47

and various ideas are part of the process. That is the beauty of learning and writing. I remind them during studio sessions and even sometimes during one-on-one sessions that it is up to them to take ownership over their paper. It is a process, and although there are certain writing concepts that are important to remember when writing, what works for some papers, will not always work for the next. It is also important to remember what works for one student, will not necessarily work for the next. The most useful quality as a writing assistant is the willingness to adapt each session to the individual needs and learning styles of the student. Ideally, it would be nice to have a nondirective approach to every session where the student is coming to realizations on their own based off our conversation. However, that is not always what is best for the student. ESL students, for example, usually have very different needs than other students. How can it be a non-directive session when they are asking specific grammar questions? It cannot, I have realized, and that is okay. Obviously, I still want the student to learn the concepts on their own and try to get them to find or fix the same issues later on in their work, but I cannot expect them to arrive at the answer themselves if they do not know the language to begin with. Therefore, being able to adapt to each student’s needs is important for the success of a session.

I have learned so much in the few years I have been at SSC, and I think a student whom I worked with this semester said it best when she said, “I am learning as I write!� It is important to continue to learn, to be open to different ideas, and to adapt to be successful not only as a writer, but I believe as a writing assistant, as well.

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Writing Assistant Narrative Nathan Floom This year marks my fourth year in the writing center and roughly my third year working exclusively online with Stark State students. I believe that working online revolves around entirely different facets and tactics of tutoring and the guiding of students towards their own learning and insights. Obviously working online completely removes the need for the student to do simple things we would expect in an in-person session such as focusing exclusively on the paper and being able to read your emotions and body language. One mode of practice and theory that I find interesting in the online tutoring world, as well as education in general, is the separation that has evolved between being computerilliterate and the ability to succeed in a tutoring session or in a college class.

This isn’t necessarily a new concept at all for me, having heard about it before and learned a little bit about it from other tutors who have explored the idea. At Stark State, we serve a truly diverse student population ranging from students just out of high school to returning adults. One difference I see frequently is between the early college seniors taking college composition in high school and adult students in the online setting. Early college students are computer-literate: fluent in both the functions of a computer and typing. Adult students frequently lack the ability to use a computer with ease or type with any level of proficiency. This makes a lot of difference in how sessions go in the writing center and in the student’s educational performance in general. In online tutoring, these differences can completely change the tone and function of sessions. For example, early college students can immediately jump in, at 49

the ready, for discussion of their paper. Should a window crash or close they know how to open it up. Simply typing a response and working on their paper while chatting with a tutor is second nature to them. Adult students, or those that are not computer-literate, take up lots of time just simply getting a paper uploaded and effectively communicate with a tutor. Their sessions consist of at least 25% of the time used to figure out basic computer stuff needed to have the session in the first place and sometimes as little as 25% of the time used for actual tutoring. I believe that up to 50% of the time could be spent by the student trying to convey their message over chat (the struggle in typing a response sometimes taking five minutes at a time to happen).

I think this theory of technology separating some from learning has a lot of consequences in the education field. The learning environment is now exclusively rooted in technology. Just like the rest of the world and society, everything is now done on a screen. The ability to spell doesn’t have that much meaning because computers spell-check our words before we even turn them in (most of them anyway). So where does this leave us in the online writing center? Do some students shy away from it and miss out on the opportunity to use it?

I think so. As a tutor this semester I’ve tried to develop things that students can use to make their experience online easier and ultimately save more time for actual discussion focused on the paper itself instead of what file format to first save the paper in and then how to upload it. My solution for this was an online “orientation” video that a student can watch and hopefully have a better understanding of the process to get set up for an online session. I suppose the question is whether or not they actually watch it and act upon it. I think we as tutors and teachers can really work to not 50

only help the student learn how to write with proficiency and express themselves, but also with computer skills and the ability to navigate technology that they might lack.

As a tutor I do feel as if I have come a long way in the Stark State Writing Center. At first I didn’t know what to expect. I had what I envisioned the expectations for college to be and how to help students generally (having just been one myself). I have been lucky enough to learn from those experienced around me and develop my own study to the point that I feel I’ve become a more competent tutor. I was really motivated through the passion and dedication of those around me willing to share theory articles to read and to start discussions on practice early on in my career here. Even though I work online I try to do my best to stay in that spirit of continual study and practice. I do wish when I first started I would have known the extraordinary struggles that many of our student body face. I think just having that nugget of understanding right off the bat would have helped me jump in better at the time.

I do feel that each year I gain something new and different from the last—whether it be from what I do here at Stark State or at other schools I work at. I think this semester I found myself a bit overwhelmed teaching for the first time and balancing tutoring along with that. While I feel I’ve lost a little of my patience (one of my strong suits I pride myself on) I feel I’ve gained a lot in job knowledge. I’ve learned new ways of dealing with post-GED and ESL students since I teach them every day. I understand more now than ever before when it comes to where our students come from education-wise and act accordingly to meet their needs wherever they may be. Maybe to put it another way: after teaching the GED and ESOL for over a semester now I 51

know where our students have been; I know where they are at; and I try really hard to get them where they need to be going. At this point in my tutoring and teaching career I know immediately where to jump in with our students and their papers. As I’ve said, in terms of my practice I feel I’ve become a little more directive as opposed to non-directive. I still try to be as non-directive as possible because I feel student selfdiscovery or learning the answers on their own though my questioning/guidance is a more valuable and accessible form. My directive-ness I think simply comes from my constant involvement with students over time.

I feel I know what they need right away and try to give them that. Striking a balance in practice is essential in this way and something I always seek to do.

For my evaluation this year I do feel as if I have strengths and weaknesses. For strengths I feel I bring to the table what I always have: punctuality, reliability, job knowledge, and dedication to growth. Working online involves a certain degree of trust and reliability which I take very seriously. I’m on time, always ready for students, and dedicated to making the online writing center a viable and quality tutoring option for students. I try to always be a team player with my fellow employees and dedicate myself to continual learning.

I’m always willing to learn new ways of doing things, to adapt, and to think on my feet in the interest of students. As for weaknesses, I would say I struggle to keep my sessions in a good balance between directive and non-directive approaches. I jump right to the point sometimes with students as opposed to dancing around it in order to guide them towards that point on their own.

This semester, like many in the past, I’ve found I had many successful sessions with students who went on to 52

do well in their classes. Like before, I’ve had more than a few students come back to have multiple sessions with me. I really enjoy seeing student papers develop from early starts, to full-fledged and fully realized work. It’s the tangible improvement I can see that really makes me feel good. When the student comes back and I can see what they changed, what they tweaked, how they have arrived at the finer points of craft and construction—that really make me feel as if I’ve made a difference to them. Working in the writing center is something I’ve always enjoyed, and working with people on their writing is my passion. I consider myself lucky to able to continue to work towards helping writers out and developing their skills here at Stark State and look forward continual dedication in my role of Writing Assistant.

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Writing Assistant Self-Evaluation Rachel Gift Last week, on a Tuesday afternoon, one of our regular ESL students, a forty-something, Iranian mother, likely educated in her own country but attending Stark State to obtain a degree in America and establish her identity outside of her family, sat down for a session that she deliberately scheduled with me. Only my second time working with her, the first session occurring two months ago, I did not expect a rapport to exist between us as strong as I suspect she had developed with my colleagues, although I do see her frequently in passing in the Writing Center. Our session involved little stress or intensity, just focused on formatting and ensuring that her assignment matched the professor’s requirements. After the session ended, she thanked me, then, to my astonishment, uninhibitedly reached out and embraced me. Affectionate by nature but conditioned in most professional settings to conceal that affection, I was taken aback but graciously hugged her in return.

“Oh my goodness,” I beamed. “Thank you so much for the hug!”

“Oh, oh, thank you for your help,” she began in her heavy Persian accent. “Every time I see you, you always brighten my day.” She gestured with her hands in a sweeping motion up to her heart, then with feeling and enthusiasm said, “I love you!” Her smile was fullbodied, her eyes sincere.

Unsurprisingly, before I could even reciprocate the love, I blushed, bowed my head, smiled shyly, and fidgeted for an instant, momentarily too overcome with affection and joy to respond with any more than mono54

syllabic gasps. That was the first time a student, particularly one with whom I spent only an hour and a half total over the course of the semester, told me that he or she loved me. It was not romantic love, obviously, but love nonetheless, openly expressed, backed by kindness and undergirded with gratitude. This caused me to wonder: What about my nature encourages people to feel comfortable enough to candidly avow love?

What enables a writing center to welcome that kind of avowal? How do I contribute to loving environments?

Is that not what we as social creatures should be doing, loving, and loving to our full capacity? Do our professional boundaries inhibit this transmission more than we realize? How many times have I reasonably withheld telling a student who imbued me with hope and affection that I care about him or her?

Our professional standards demand, for valid reasons, that we conceal love. Sexual attraction, while perhaps generated from the same energetic source, I exclude from this topic. I refer here only to compassionate love, which itself is attraction via recognition—not merely the empathetic capacity to step inside another person’s existence but to stand back and love him or her purely for existing. This is what I have learned over the past year about my practice. I love. To the ends of fulfillment and depletion, loss and gain, ego deconstruction and ego reconstruction, I love.

I suppose this compassion-in-action is my version of “queering” the writing center, for is it not queer, is it not weird to love, especially when love is predominantly considered exclusive to bordered relationships and rules? Besides, do we not perceive love as dangerous, as drawing people too close, particularly as professionals, to the softest, most intimate regions of our beings? Yet, does love not create spaces hospitable 55

enough for people to ask for help?

Time and time again I hear students say, “I am so grateful for the Writing Center. You guys are so helpful.” This concept of help, the availability of it, and the response of those who seek and receive it, defines the ultimate purpose of a writing center despite (or in encompassment of) all the theories intended to dictate the conduct of our practices. We help people. That is what we do fundamentally, and an augmented version of that assistance consists of love filtered through the higher consciousness which it stimulates.

However possible, or however impossible it is to help all people in the myriad of ways that they may need help, the most minor extension of assistance, provided in a genuine and nonjudgmental manner within an environment open to anyone in need, can be enough to comfort people, to give them a place to which, if they chose to, they can return for guidance, for recognition, for eye contact, for a place where their faces, if not also their names, are known and remembered. It is more than just identity building or identity confirmation that occurs here. It is saying, “Yes, you can be here, we will see you, we will do what we can to help you, and you will not be turned away.” My goal in my personal and professional life is to provide welcoming environments in which people can disarm, relax, and seek help with a neutral or positive return. Granted, success in creating those environments sometimes eludes me, and in rare instances it returns negatively upon me, but it remains a conscious endeavor nonetheless, a deliberate projection of love and acceptance that guides my practice as an educator and human being.

From love, however, stems a risk of vulnerability and, more relevantly, exhaustion. Within the past week, a 56

nursing student—jovial, personable, and uplifting, which made for a fast-paced but casual and connective session—asked me to check if her abstract summarized her APA paper sufficiently. Immediately, I dove into her essay, absorbed every line, and at one point while I was reading she remarked on my thoroughness, that “you are taking more time than I did to read that.” I said that I was reviewing the paper from a writing tutor’s standpoint while simultaneously internalizing the concepts it defined. The paper’s premise explored the primary causes of motivation and burn out in nurses, and one of those concepts was compassion fatigue. I pointed to her essay and exclaimed, “I didn’t know this was an actual concept! That’s awesome. I’m experiencing that right now in my life.” Although still in school, she works as a nurse already, so she understood the experience of compassion fatigue as well, not merely the concept.

Albeit minimally, I experienced compassion fatigue with her. The juxtaposition between us I felt instantly simply in our bodies—bodies, these wonderful and horrible vessels of sense perception. She was heavy, one of the heaviest students with whom I have ever worked, who sat next to me, an active, wiry woman, who fought an eating disorder throughout most of her twenties (a disorder connected to gender identification) and therefore works to maintain holistic strength. Upon sitting down I thought, “Please don’t judge me for my weight or think I am judging you. This is the reality of our bodies, this is the space we fill, and it is objective reality not a judgment.” I did whatever I could to project as clearly as possible nonjudgmental receptivity and engagement so that nothing could inhibit the true exchange of selves possible through reciprocal recognition. I fear discrimination based on weight because in times past I endured such discrimination, and I never 57

want someone else to experience the deflation and selfquestioning caused by such judgment. Thankfully, we connected instantly. She was nice, complimentary, and probably a hilarious, affable nurse, so no issue between us ever arose. In fact, our session ended with us sharing stories of our favorite foods. By the end of our hour together, though, after teaching and performing every basic APA formatting task known to man, engaging conversationally with her, and trying to avoid absorbing too much of her existence into my own (her life and death), I felt exhausted. I loved her and wanted to hug her, at times even curl up beside her, but I felt relieved when the session ended. My energy supply had reached its limit, yet it is only when we push beyond our limits that we expand our capacity to love and help.

Far deeper, more intimate sessions than that with students have occurred throughout this semester. While last semester consisted mainly of consecutive rapid-fire tutorials totaling in the hundreds by the end, this semester has consisted predominantly of two groups: the rare student who makes a profound impact on my spiritual life, and steady regulars, people who come in not only for help but also to be seen and to see us, the tutors. Writing tutoring sessions can be multifaceted in that way, that while in one aspect they serve a tool (the primary if not only reason why students visit us), in another they function as social interactions for those who acknowledge existence and significance in us as people. We are not merely tutors by then, but people with names. Recognition returns on us, which strengthens the environment and inherently creates a comfort zone; for next to strength a vulnerable creature may stand less afraid.

This functionality and recognition I witness on most 58

Saturdays when a WC regular, F, a kindhearted, dreadheaded, 33-year-old family man with Tourette’s, comes in to work with me. Typically, our sessions last an hour to an hour and a half, ample time to form a bond. We spent the majority of those hours on his Cultural Diversity movie, a project that required him to download on the school’s computer Microsoft Movie Maker, a program unknown to me prior to his arrival, just as it was unknown to him, hence his request for help. So with no choice but to attack the unfamiliar, I began, read through his packet of instructions, discovered how to download the software, and then guided him through the rest of the packet just to get us started. While working with him on that project for almost two months (occasionally we worked on other assignments in between), I gained a glimpse into his life more assorted than that usually afforded by students. Personal images create that effect, and to layer images of his hobbies, family, and children with music and vocal narration (which I also guided him through developing) broadened the scope of my view of his life. F never fails to express gratitude, and after the last session of working on his movie he said, “I am so glad you learned all of that. I don’t know what I would have done without you. Phshew! Never be afraid to ask for help.”

My sessions with F overlapped and interconnected with some of the most private aspects of my life outside of work. The reason I knew how to operate that program so competently was because I used it to create my own movie right after F introduced it to me. I compiled into movie-form all the photos of my three girls, old students of mine from when I tutored in Walsh’s Structured Education Program who over the years became my family, as close to me as if I had adopted and claimed them as my own daughters. Since I am moving to the West soon, I wanted to create a movie for them 59

that chronicled our years together. Approximately thirty-five hours I dumped into that movie: the music, the timing, the meaning. Its completion represents the most profound extension of my job as a writing tutor in the lengths to which a tutor can travel through the door to a person’s mental, emotional, and physical environment. Inextricable from these young women’s lives is my psyche. What they feel, I feel. When they fall, I am there. When I fall, they are there. Their tribulations at times have brought me to my knees, caused me to lose sleep, expended every internal resource I stored, forced me to create more resources at will, demanded virtues that demolished my ego, and required composure that tempered or suspended all emotions. Their triumphs I celebrate with a pride akin to that of a true guardian but perhaps even more precious and acute because, since love not blood binds us, I remain highly aware of how rare my place in their lives is and how at any time it could disappear.

To one of them in particular I have patiently served for well over two years as a confidant, someone who knows at least fragments of her deepest suffering, the person to whom she reaches when she wants to die, the person who withstands her emotional lacerations and the violent ejections from her soul, and the person whom she frantically called to come “help” her when she nearly hurled herself off a bridge which for an hour I could not find. The latter ordeal, which impacted me permanently and inexpressibly, occurred three weeks ago, and the day after it happened, F entered the Writing Center as a walk-in, on a Thursday during Spring Break, to find me sobbing into Sandy Dent’s arms. His chance to view inside my life, to see the evidence of my love for someone in my anguish over almost losing her, had arrived. His eyes expressed compassion toward me in every subsequent session from then on out.

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When I glance more into others’ lives—if I perceive with compassion and without preconceptions—my existence enlarges. That girl began as my student, on a surface level, but over time not only did I obtain insight into her life, but I also realized the strength of my empathetic bond to her—so strong that when she was sexually assaulted two years ago, I was on the floor at my house sobbing hysterically and screaming for help for what I thought was no reason. Little did I know then that a noticeable portion of the emotions I would experience from that day forward would also be hers.

During these past few months in particular, the capacity to love, compounded with my capacity to perform and empathize satisfactorily at my job, exploded outward like a mushroom cloud. I love like never before, effusively, more detachedly but less restrictedly, even if I must mask its conspicuity when it emerges too forcefully or inconveniently.

Not only is there an increase in love, but almost not making it in time to save her life intensified my awareness to just how close people may be to the brink of death when we see them in writing centers. Just listening to a studio session student’s story about her abusive past, her husband’s suicide (the four-year anniversary for which landed on our studio session evening), and her hospitalization and recovery, divested me of any remaining preconception I had of people’s mental health and their aliveness. I learned amid the urgency of personal crisis that a significant percentage of the time, we do not know what people endure. When people walk into writing centers, we do not know the degree of their need for help. When we see people on the streets, we do not know. When we hold a conversation, we do not know. When we look in the mirror, even then we may not know, or we may hide. It varies every single time, which is why compassion, in whatever 61

degree it is expressed or in whatever manner it dictates our treatment of individuals and of ourselves, is crucial. Otherwise, we perpetuate an unjust system by remaining blind to the serious psychological issues and emotional quality of others.

Earlier today, when a fluke absence of students resulted in an MLA workshop comprised of only one person, I encountered one of the most emotionally magnificent human beings ever to enter my professional sphere. He sat in the computer lab in the middle row while I tried to un-awkwardly fill the time waiting for potential stragglers. As soon I realized that no one else would be joining us, I began asking him specific questions about his 8-page research paper. Upon his arrival, basing my prediction of the attendees on information conferred to me by his professor, I stood under the impression that he was just another student coming in to take down notes on research and citation methods, of which by that point his grasp was to be fairly competent. Quickly, however, I discovered this to be false. Instead, he was an emotional force whose mental life was still in the process of undergoing a radial reformation as he slowly reintegrated back into society after eighteen years in prison. Eighteen years, a prisoner. I knew instantly that whoever he was prior to prison was not the lean, gracefully tattooed, deep and intent brown-eyed man who sat before me. No, this was a man changed.

This was an animal adapting to a strange land.

Mixed into the verbal summary of his essay topic flowed the driving force behind its design: his personal narrative, a consciously chosen compilation of starkly cogent, emotionally powered, lucidly understood reflections on his prison history, psychological conditioning, and present existence. In the course of what for others may have been as a jumbled mess, he spilled out 62

with conviction, specificity, clarity, and meaning the intent and ideas behind his entire research paper. Purpose, audience, social value, psychological import, opposing viewpoints, research—everything—he knew it; it was all there. The only issue was that it was in his mind, not on paper. The MLA formatting and the pressure to be correct and knowledgeable about it barricaded even the attempt to write. He stood paralyzed before a formula he did not understand because to him, the math already made sense in his mind without it.

Any normal MLA workshop would have involved me walking a group through a PowerPoint slideshow, improvising where needed as I stood at the head of the room. Once I understood his fear, though, I realized that the PowerPoint was initially useless to us. Our workshop needed intimacy and fluidity, not structure and linear explanation. He needed to talk. He needed a conversation. He needed to express his exact objective, so I beckoned him to sit next to me at the front computer so we could work side by side. As soon as he began explaining his paper on the emotional quality of men recently released from prison, what the community at large misperceives about them, how the system abuses them by sending them out with stripped lives and stripped identities so that they ultimately return to prison, and the community’s need for awareness to the emotional states of these men—I realized that already, inherently, he knew how to write a research paper more competently than most of the people I have ever seen at Stark State. Testing his knowledge of essaywriting by mechanical standards alone would fail to catch the power of his mind. He knew what he intended. He was raw. He was a raw creature. And in that moment, so was I.

As I sat with him and told him that “You know, you 63

just need to free write, let it all out. It will flow as it is and then you can come to the writing center and we will help you. We will help you shape it and format it.

Don’t worry about the format now. Just write. Think about and internalize your research, and just write,” something seemed to click for him. I was able to use his words and his ideas to then illustrate select PowerPoint slides (framing, introducing quotes, paraphrasing) when I knew he was ready, when I knew it would not overwhelm him. I assured him that he could get the formatting done after he expelled from his mind everything in it. Over the course of the workshop, his face relaxed; most of the nervousness and anxiety fell away.

Not only that, but he also understood the research paper process more formally by the end of workshop. I kept thinking (sub)consciously, How can I help this man understand a research paper? What can I do with this raw material so that I can give it back to him more useable in this context than it was before? In the end, I realized that I was just glad I got the chance to help him, however successful or unsuccessful. I did my best to listen and respond constructively, compassionately, and objectively. After all, he only wanted his voice heard, he knew what he was saying, and I heard him.

I also felt him. I looked into him. We stared into each other’s eyes for almost the entire session. When he spoke of how women need to be patient with, understand, and care for the emotional needs of men who have been released from long-term prison sentences, my whole personhood stretched out and wanted to hug him, assure him that I would do anything I could to help—whatever it took. His emotional needs my entire being wanted to care for and nurture, his description of prisoners being stripped of their identities nearly brought me to tears, but I kept returning myself to the objective present, to the writing center, to using that 64

raw material to create something tangible: his voice and his purpose organized in an essay that matched his inner vision and met the class’s requirements. He wanted to be heard, to help people see. Afterward, I saw, and I am not the same.

Even my research this semester changed me. The evolution of my NEWCA conference presentation, which I recently recanted, occurred in the midst of these stratified compassionate, critical experiences, as well as during self-reflection on my sexual identity and sexual manifestation. The NEWCA conference theme this year is gender/sex embodiment, and it calls for presentations on anything from discrimination against varying forms of gender identification to sexual harassment. Intent on formulating a worthwhile presentation, gender fluidity and bisexuality then became focal points as I navigated through a compulsory selfexploration that transpired after a long breakup from a serious, monogamous, year-long (a duration of about half my employment at Stark State) relationship with a beautiful couple. Although I consciously struggled with my bisexuality from age fifteen onward, it seemed that now, at age thirty, after a relationship with two people I loved profoundly, both its impact and implications surfaced more evidently in my sense of place as a professional and social adult. While romantically bisexuality and gender fluidity manifests most visibly as a curse (however much a matter of perception that may be), to me, gender fluidity in a work setting—or any objective setting—augments my adaptability, enables flexibility within different contexts and with different individuals, whether they are male, female, gay, straight, polyamorous, asexual, abused, untouched, or something in between, beyond, combined, modified, or nearly destroyed. During one studio session, I could identify with a husband who argued in a 65

Beliefs and Values paper that it is possible to love two people simultaneously. When people avidly defend their interracial coupling, I understand them. When people feel alienated, get ridiculed, or feel awkward in groups because of their sexuality or gender identity, I understand. When people express a desire to be a different sex, I understand them. When men mourn over the loss of their wives, I understand them. When women seek security in men, I understand them. I understand the desire to be a mother and a father. I understand loving people in ways that are influenced by embodiment but which also transcend bodily forms. I understand. But, I also do not understand, although I will try to understand, and I will love, however feeble the attempt.

Much of my scholarship, then, has been as much if not more experiential than academic and at first revolved around bisexuality studies but then, the more I researched and observed my surroundings, particularly involving the trauma that my girl endured after her rape, my own experiences with sexual and psychological trauma, plus the trauma I witness(ed) in sexually abused exes and students, migrated into mental health studies. More and more I kept reading about how the effect of responses to marginality on people’s emotional states is identifiable and active. As a result, my attention to the emotional quality and needs of people—to the needs about which I know little to nothing— increased. Through my own endeavor to eradicate the confusion and even the shame that has tinted my perception of my own sexual and psychological nature, I discovered that people, including me and probably many students, find ways to navigate through different environments in a protective way as to avoid prejudice and injury. I know I do. I know that I continually thank my femininity and personality for enabling me to 66

avoid some of the worst types of discrimination and stereotyping that can occur from those quick to judge others based on appearance or embodiment of gender/ sex, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, mental health status, etc. From a person-in-environment standpoint, that potential on-guard attitude and anticipation of discrimination is why writing centers should be conscious zones, unprejudiced spaces where tutors and staff remain aware of what they know and do not know about how students and colleagues cope with their sense of place in the world.

While individuals with healthy self-confidence are important to consider, it is the vulnerable ones, the ones whose self-esteem plummets at even the suspected presence of discrimination or ridicule, the ones who teeter on the edge of suicide, the ones who question the worth of living, whom I care about most. It is the ones who go home at night and battle internal wars about which we know nothing. It may not involve sexuality or gender but any type of psychological trauma or conflict, so maybe fostering validation of existence through a conscious recognition of emotional quality/mental health and stratified identity—the overlapping factors that make us who we are and affect our performance within society—is part of the key no matter the case.

We need to recognize the fact that the people sitting in front of us in writing centers are whole beings with whole lives, and we do not know what they endure.

We do not know.

Empathy studies, gender fluidity studies, bisexuality studies, eco-social work theories, Lord of the Rings, intense self-reflection, Thoreau, long hikes with my dog, dancing and music, and increased consciousness during interactions with students, friends, colleagues, and family, all contributed to my growth this semester 67

and enhanced my capacity to love queerly. Without a doubt, particularly as I prepare to move across the country into the unknown, I am even more aware of my impact on those around me and their impact on me, and I love more than ever.

Occasionally that love is reciprocated, as is the care, but not always and not consistently. Often the vulnerability that my love caused last semester and this semester exposed me to such a degree that my only coping mechanism was to purge my life of all love so I could repair my heart, repair my sense of self, and forget that my body can feel. Doubtless, loving nearly destroys me, rips the sentimentality right out of me and demands that I stitch myself up, examine life lucidly, and never expect continuity or reciprocity. Love teaches me to detach, to let go, and to accept that sometimes I cannot help people in the ways they dearly need but to remain strong enough to attempt to help even when all my tools run out. It teaches me, too, that I am merely a vessel.

I find myself fortunate enough to receive love from others in needed places when I have nothing more to give, and one of those places is in the writing center.

My job environment has been my conscious zone, a place where I learned how to turn my own mental health and sexual history into space-creating energy and understanding. My colleagues, whether they know it or not, provide for me what I strive to provide for myself and others: safe places where it is okay to ask for help; where it is acceptable to sit in a corner and be left alone, receive a hug during a grueling emotional breakdown or a congratulations during a celebratory time; or where one can simply ask for an ear, a light conversation, or maybe to go out for beer, dinner, or dancing. Morgan, Ben, Sandy, Andrew, Jon, Matt, Jessi68

ca, even Angie, Dan and Corrie, and of course my best friend of many years, Steven, grew not only to be friends, even extended family members, but a dependable support system. They are also people whom I respect as intelligent, meaningful, caring, receptive, weird, and finite lights who shine completely independent of me. During harrowing hours, work was my salvation. During joyful hours, joy could be shared. At work, fear and insecurity vanished and love increased.

The ego deconstructed and reconstructed over and over and over again, and I learned to love myself. Writing centers should always be spaces of this sort.

While I cannot vouch much for my professional performance this year, except to say that it hovered steadily above adequate, I can say that as a perceiving creature I underwent a profound transformation of selfhood, the full manifestation of which may never be discernable amid the constant flux of existence. While uncertainty lurks in all contexts, as long as I operate as a vessel for help for students and people, then I am stable in the moment; I know, generally speaking, that I do my job well. If my strengths and weaknesses are to be evaluated, evaluate them based on whether or not I have successfully taught other human beings how to be better writers, whether or not I have treated people justly, whether or not I have taken into account someone’s mental health, and whether or not I have attempted to increase my capacity to love queerly and courageously, no matter the form, and no matter if ultimately it does not matter.

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Yearly Narrative Rob Balla For a narrative this semester, I had originally written a very detailed analysis of teaching grammar, punctuation, and syntax in the writing center. This was to form the basis for a paper I intend to author for academic publication. I had completed a draft of this paper; however, I did not save the draft before I logged out for the day, and the aforementioned masterpiece was lost. As a result, I am now faced with beginning anew. However, I think I will breach a different topic, one which we as tutors are reticent to discuss: weaning students off of our services or in a more positive light, getting them to be more self-sufficient.

This year I have been working with a specific student in great amount. Let’s call the student Pat. Starting in the fall semester, Pat began working with me for an Introduction to Academic Writing course with Professor X (a pseudonym). This semester, Pat is enrolled in College Composition, again with Professor X. For the bulk of last semester and the entirety of this semester, Pat has and is scheduling one full hour meeting with me three days per week. In addition to utilizing my services, Pat also schedules a full hour session at least one other day per week (occasionally two days) with a different (but always the same) tutor (Tutor Y), for a total of four to five (4-5) hours of tutoring per week, almost every week.

This raises two separate but intertwined issues. The 70

first is that Pat is reticent, hesitant, and even openly opposed to change and working with different people.

As the semester is nearing an end, Pat is scheduling for next semester. Pat, thinking about taking Effective Speaking, asked if Professor X teaches the course, (no) if I teach the course (no), and if Tutor Y teaches the course (no). Pat was dismayed and expressed a desire not take the course if one of the three of us did not teach the course. Pat even said, “In that case, I’m just not going to take it.”

One of the primary goals of the SSC Writing Center, and of writing centers in general, is to expose a writer to multiple voices of critique and divergent viewpoints.

This is clearly not happening with Pat. Pat will only work with Tutor Y or myself. While it is comforting for a student to work familiar individuals, I feel students should be encouraged to seek out new voices, new points of view, to boldly work with those whom they have not worked with before. On occasions where Pat was unable to schedule with myself or Tutor Y and was asked to schedule with a different tutor, Pat has refused politely. I am not sure how to approach this subject. Should we insist Pat work with various tutors? If a student refuses to work with a preferred tutor, the student may stop using our services all together. This yields two negative outcomes: 1) the student does not receive the services asked for and in effect paid for; 2) the WC loses a client which reduces our utilization rate, affecting budget and hours. I am not sure of how to address this issue. Possibly this could be discussed in or before next year’s start up meeting.

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The second issue highlighted by Pat’s usage of the WC is that often my time with her is less than fully productive. At first, Pat needed consistent help and guidance in sessions. However, for much of this semester, Pat has not needed constant supervision. Often in sessions I simply sit there and assent to Pat’s decisions. Pat will offer one way of phrasing a sentence or idea and then immediately revise the sentence or idea and leadingly ask me if like the second one better: “That’s better, right?” Usually before I can even nod, Pat has written the second, revised phrase. For much of our sessions, this is about the extent of involvement in the actual writing of the paper or offering suggestions or posing probing questions. Possibly the most consistent form of aid I offer is to keep Pat focused on writing and redirecting Pat when Pat begins to get distracted by errant thoughts about family or weather or whomever walked into the WC. This hardly seems to be an effective or efficient use of my time.

Again, the question is how to address the situation. It would be rude to tell Pat to not use our services, and at times they are needed (just not very often and not for a full hour four or five times per week). It would also be against our business self-interest to turn away a potential client. It could be argued that the session time could be better utilized by other students; however, we do not operate at full capacity. Currently, I often find that Pat can work alone for a bit while I take care of some other business such as entering slips or signing in a new student or occasionally simply making up an excuse to walk away for a bit to foster her selfsufficiency. I firmly believe that Pat could perform the 72

majority of her work independently. In fact, I have on occasion assigned homework, and it has usually been completed competently.

In essence, however, we, the Writing Center, will not always be there for students who need help but are hesitant to seek it elsewhere, or who no longer need help except in the form of a crutch. I feel it our duty to help these student leave the nest (so to speak) and fly on their own. We need to do a better job of helping students help themselves.

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Writing Assistant Narrative and Self-Assessment Sandy Dent Each time that I’ve written my assessment, it has reflected greatly the positive experiences I had while spending more than five years at Stark State College as a Writing Assistant as well as the six years as a student tutor at Kent State-Stark Campus. I am pleased to be able to say I still feel a strong commitment and love for my job and the people with whom I work, both colleagues and students. Each year brings me closer to the necessity of considering retirement, have done so seriously this year and feel the time is still in the future.

This year, in particular, has presented many changes, both professional and personal, change is something I have battles with in regard to maintaining stability in my life. I am consistently developing ways to make predictability and chaos work together so that I might be less stressed and focus on my responsibilities. For the most part in years past at SSC, this has worked quite well. This year has presented many challenges, some, I’ve not been prepared for and have had some difficulty weaving my way through them. I appreciate, particularly the understanding I’ve been shown by Leah regarding the need to back away and take a day or two to look at my employment at different angles.

This, I believe, is one of my major strengths. It may take a bit of doing, yet if I love my work, I will find a way to manage to do the best possible which requires time to realize then implement those changes. I know computers and I will never have a cordial relationship; 74

I have tried classes, tutoring in smaller classes and have found that I work best in a one-on-ones learning environment. I accomplished this by asking a colleague, while we work two hours an evening a week, to assist with particular areas of difficulty pertaining to the Writing Center, I may be having. This method has proven to work the best for me and I am improving steadily in my computer skills.

Technology and I will meet whether I like it or not apparently, as I will be presenting at the ECWCA conference 2015 at Notre Dame with the topic of bridging the Digital Divide. I have been successful in finding information credible to this subject and look forward to representing SSC. I have written one or two articles on the subject of ways to make the transition to technology less stressful, and have been published in a newsletter or two in 2014- 2015. I was responsible for formatting our own Writing Center’s newsletter as well, so indeed I continue to wave at technology from across the room and am slowly moving toward it step by hesitant step and know one day I will arrive. This is an area of weakness, yet I am stubborn. These are things I have learned about myself in my years here, yet as I am a realistic person, know that I have a journey to go and need to remain on task.

Gains and losses, there have been a few. I would define gains as my ability to look at what I am doing or not doing, that benefits or inhibits my position in the Writing Center. I decided not to be a Mentor this Spring Semester as it seemed I was at a loss as to what to accomplish and felt a lack of commitment in some 75

ways. I would like to pick it up again in the fall to see if I just needed a break from the position. I have had a loss, noticeable to me, in patience with mundane occurrences, and yet can sit for many hours assisting a client who sincerely wants my help. If they are willing to work for a better paper, I am willing to work to assist them do be a better writer. One important accomplishment I feel I’ve succeeded at is the ability to differentiate the need of a more hands on technique with that of a let the client work within his own realm of focus. I have met with some dissatisfaction from some, yet feel I have defended my style professionally and will continue to do so. This would be an area of where I have improved in my confidence as a Writing Assistant and want to develop more fully, particularly in this critical area of the writing process.

What I will always think about and focus on are the clients with whom I work. They provide me with the most satisfaction and the struggle worth going through.

I was given a small gift from a person I worked with for, I was told, my patience, kindness and understanding of their particular difficulties concerning writing.

This, and the look on the face of a student who “gets it� after a lengthy conversation to develop an assignment are the reasons I stay, even if there are days when the idea of remaining a tutor creates doubts.

No, this has not been a great year, generally nor my best year as a tutor. I will not give up asking questions until I receive the information needed or looking for the answer on my own. I will continue to work with my colleagues on ways to improve the Writing Center and 76

be pleased with successful changes made. I will continue to learn as much as I am able to absorb and will not be afraid to admit there are certain tasks not best suited for me. I will never forget the person that I am responsible for, the client in front of me, who is certain they are a terrible writer, have nothing of importance to offer in an essay, that leave a session with me with the knowledge they have the capability of not only producing a better paper but to become a student who is indeed, a better writer.

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Tutoring Students in Fear and Doubt Steven Fregeau “My son got shot in cold blood in a cocaine deal. He wasn’t doing anything but paying for it.” “I spent three and a half years in a penitentiary. I got raped every week.” “I was addicted to crack for seventeen years, and I went from being a street-fighting pimp to sleeping in a shelter with burns on my hands.” “I chased gangs out of the Newton Zone in Canton with a flashlight and my dog. I did this as a mother in the community.” “I got arrested for a murder I didn’t commit, was found innocent and still had to stay in jail for three months because I didn’t do all my community service because my car broke down.” “I worked on a cotton farm in Georgia in the seventies, and it was hell. That’s why I don’t trust white people.” “My mom showed up at my trailer last year. She left me with a homeless man when I was six, and this is the first time I’ve seen her in fifteen years.” “My high school math teacher beat me up and gave me a black eye. My dad beat him up that night at a bar and I got expelled the next day. I am stupid because of him.” These are all stories I heard, privately, from students at Stark State during my first semester as a writing assistant.

The students’ first assignment is to write a narrative essay about an experience, with description and details. These are the experiences that should have been written down, but which were not. The students told them to me—and sometimes to the small groups we work in—but within a week’s time, these same students decided not to write them, to change their subject, to deal with something else, to write about something so mediocre as to be almost pleasant. A fishing trip. Going to Olive Garden to celebrate an anniver78

anniver sary. Spending time with a son or daughter.

Playing cards. The decision to go to a community college. Having tonsils out.

There are good things in life. There is love, happiness, laughter, peace, and achievement. That should not be overlooked or ignored. My concern is not that the bad was exchanged for the good in the case of these students, or that any student should choose to write about something pleasant. My concern is that the result was mediocre when it could have been profound. It could have been real. It could have been astonishing. But it was not. Something got in the way—fear.

Of what these students were ultimately afraid, I do not know. I cannot imagine that it was the professors, although perhaps a little mistrust (“I don’t trust white people”) unconsciously made it so. It could have been the fact that a committee would be reviewing these students’ papers in order to determine whether the students were prepared to move on to the next class in the sequence— a committee of unknown (probably largely white male) authority figures. The idea itself, whether it is true or not, of an authoritative committee is something these students have been conditioned against all of their lives. It could have been fear of me.

Who am I, this person in pressed black slacks and a tie?

Am I a professional, like the other professionals these students have had to deal with all their lives? Me, a white male—might I be one of those parole officers, judges, guards, spoiled brats, rich people, high school (college!) graduates who was sent to monitor the activity of the blacks, the poor, the uneducated, the druggies, the cast-offs, the criminals, the refuse of liberalcapitalist America? Any of us—professor, committee, or tutor—could betray them; their trust can only stretch so far into honesty. They do fear us, whether we like it 79

or not.

Then again, in the moment of thinking, these students have been subtly coerced (because they have been allowed, they have been permitted) to look into themselves. They have been given—without instruction, advice or preparation—the freedom to examine their lives and their selves in relation to their lives. When they review their lives, every philosophical problem reveals itself to them at once: is this fate or free will? is this God or self? am I open or limited? is it best to live or to die? am I right or wrong? what is truth?¹ In confronting the self, the self is revealed. It has suffered duly and unduly; and we all know this, but only insofar as we determine our morals against which we measure ourselves. The morals determined inwardly conflict with those established by conditioning. That is, what we believe and what we experience come into conflict when the expected result of an action based on a stimulus is contrary to expectation. In literature, we call this “irony,” with a thousand definitions for its imagined expression. In life, its actual expression is tragedy, not that the end is suffering, but that the suffering itself, at whatever point it occurs, is tragic². Anyone who looks inward to experience fears the unknown, which is, ironically, the answer to all philosophical questions.

Socrates’ most important statements, as any philosopher knows, are “know thyself” and “I know nothing.”

For a student who spent his or her life eradicating contradictions, is there any greater contradiction than the two phrases Socrates uttered for which everyone, even his enemies, still love him? In fear, we deny and retract.

Yet even this is ironic, and Socrates (of course) was no stranger to irony; but because it is ironic, it is tragic, too.

Nietzsche wrote: 80

one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond all doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man: and whoever can still bear to hear how . . . in this night of torment and absurdity there has resounded the cry of love, . . . will turn away, seized by invincible horror.— There is so much in man that is hideous!— Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!— (GM II.22) This seems, perhaps, a depressing thought. How could “love” be the misconstruing of sickness, and still bring about some goodness, any goodness, from the tragedy of self-reflection? What of this “madhouse” earth, the cell block of every individual’s individual madness, is still good? Should we, à la Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather,” hand everything over to the majority? These are fearful thoughts! They are fearful for us, fearful for others—fearful for everyone!

The worst fear I have as an educator is that one day a student will turn to me and instead of telling his or her story, ask, “What is your experience?” I fear that because I will be honest, and then my fear will confront all of its ramifications in my self because I will not have turned away from the abyss when I should have; I will confront my mediocrity. I do know their fear, though, these students. Because there is no answer to questions which are unknowable and because the abyss stares back vacantly, there is no assurance. And because there is no answer one way or the other, we fall on mediocrity (literally, the “middle,” the “median”), which assures only that in our indecision we will be neither right nor wrong, but at least not wrong.

I understand why these students have chosen to revert 81

to mediocre things. I know why they choose to withhold their best stories. At times, the “night of torment and absurdity” does resound with “the cry of love,” and that love is a lie. Who can bear to think that love is not real? Yet, this is not a depressing thought. Nietzsche did not end here. This is only his challenge to us. The challenge is: what is the real love, and when does it cry out? These students have found it in themselves to tell me the truth at least once. At least once, I have known them for who they are, and they were brave in that. I assure them, “We are not the police.

Your writing is circumstantial. It will not hold up in court! Your professor would rather read a good story, even if you claim afterwards that it was fiction, than something everyone already knows is going to be boring. Etc., etc.” But think of what I say! I ask them to lie, to deny what they really went through; I ask them to betray their truths for the sake of a good story. I cannot do that. I must let them be honest in another way. I must let them fear.

And I fear, too. I fear my own mediocrity. I fear that my work as their tutor is mediocre, that I am not giving them what they need, and that I am not able to communicate with them in a way that will convey my love for people in such a way as to instill trust of me— of the middle-aged white male—in them. I fear that I will disappoint them, let them down, and lose them to themselves and to others.

I am not like them, but I am not like my own people either. Being no-one in the middle, I have at least mutability. This is precisely why I cannot teach, but why I can tutor— I am Proteus, one thing for a while, and another for a while, but nothing consistently. I am perspectival, and between this and that, am myself only by accident. Not Oedipus, not Orestes, not Prome82

theus, not Sisyphus (as so many anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, poets, theologians… theorists… have speculated are the paradigms of humanity), but one who changes, and who, if held on to for so long, eventually becomes himself. My talent, if it can be called that, is changing according to the individual, not the class or collective, and it becomes the fearful thing, which I can only know as the thing I, too, fear. So I am no teacher, but privately, individually, changeably, a tutor. I cannot be part of a group, but I can be part of a relation.

I have already betrayed my students in this relation because I have exposed my students’ stories at the beginning of this story. Even though I have given them anonymity, I have exposed them. But perhaps that is what they need and also what we need. They need the catharsis, and we need the honesty; what can be said anonymously and pseudonymously can be said in toto: the catharsis of unification precedes the catharsis of clarification. If I have been able to make their mediocrity passable, then mine will not be wasted. They have joined with the other whom they fear in composing something mediocre which the other will not react to, and so they eliminated the preventative mindset of resistance to truth about their own private abysses.

Opposites act upon themselves. Because they have trusted me with their stories, I will claim them as my own, and lie, and say that I made up these experiences myself. This is true. I have invented these experiences.

But note that they reflect upon the nature of the experiences I have been told in trust. I only lied because I will not betray that trust. In fact, the student’s stories I began with are permutations of reality, are Protean reflections of reality. Now, would you trust me, who told you he was telling the truth, if I admitted to being a 83

liar? This evidence will not hold up in court. There is my strength, but also my weakness.

I seem to have reached an utter impasse or agnosticism here, but this is not the case. It is the case that I have lied and told the truth, and so I have contradicted myself in this sense. In another, I have been honest. In honesty, I have said what I need to say, and thoroughly reflected on my ascribed as well as my inherited place in this particular community. Descartes prescribed dubitability as the test of any argument’s reality, but Emerson, in his poem “Brahma,” writes: “I am the doubter and the doubt.”³ I remember something one of my students said, and wrote it down immediately so as never to forget: “At first, you think it’s all roses,” & it is, L——, it is, even After the first snowfall melts & the lights burn out— It is black roses among the white & the madness of the gods Laughing on the highway All the way home.

He says, “You gotta reach out, “Take care of your people.

“Say, ‘here’s what I got to give. “ ‘Now, if you give what you got to give, “ ‘we’ll be alright.’

“Man, when your scars run deep, “They open up your heart.”

So never doubt these days

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End Notes ¹Jesus said, “ ‘I was born to this, and for this reality I came into the world: that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that comes out of the truth hears my voice.’ Pilate says to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” [ἐγὼ εἰς τοῦτο γεγέννημαι καὶ εἰς τοῦτο ἐλήλυθα εἰς τὸν κόσμον ἵνα μαρτυρήσω τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πᾶς ὁ ὢν ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας ἀκούει μου τῆς φωνῆς λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ Πιλᾶτος Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια ] (John 18:37-8, my translation). Pilate received no answer. ²See Walter Kaufmann’s “Nietzsche between Homer and Sartre: Five Treatments of the Orestes Story,” Review Inernationale de Philosophie 18, no. 67 (1964): 50-73 for a full treatment of tragedy as suffering, but not necessarily as a sad ending; see especially 70: “Indeed, of Sophocles’ extant seven plays all but Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone end on a conciliatory note, and four end untragically,” and yet they are all called “tragedies”… contra Aristotle. ³The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson in One Volume (New York: Black’s Readers Service Company, n.d.), 78.

after midterms this semester.

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Bibliography Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson in One Volume. New York: Black’s Readers Service Company, n.d.

Kaufmann, Walter. “Nietzsche between Homer and Sartre: Five Treatments of the Orestes Story.” Review Inernationale de Philosophie. 18, no. 67 (1964): 50 -73.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans.

Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989.

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