Observation in the Bookstore's Cafe

Observations:
1) smells like coffee
2) there were seven students here already
- 2 girls talking (one is Krystina)
- 2 other girls talking
- 1 girl studying
- 2 guys reading (one is David)
3) people who've walked since being here: 9
4) people who've bought something: 3
5) cashiers: 1
6) sounds: loose change clinking, receipts printing, machine beeping, water running, students talking, squeaking
7) there are wood and carpet floorings
8) people enter from both entrances
9) there's some sort of crowd control guides to help create lines

Questions/Thoughts:
1) the smell is strong; how many people get coffee here a day?
2) 7 students were already here, but not many of them seemed to have coffee. This place could probably seat 35 people.
3&4) 9 people have come in and only 3 have bought something; only 2 have stayed.
5) maybe a lot of people come in at other times (since there are so many seats), but this time of day must be slow.
6) some things are happening
7) some people are sitting at tables on both surfaces
8) there's fairly open access with two fairly wide entrances - many people can be facilitated
9) there must be times when a lot of people are here, necessitating the line guide, but right now it's pretty slow

North: What's Our Direction

It's interesting, I think, how he thought that writing centers should be kept as the private property of the English Department. I wonder if that's really a good direction to go in because all it does is deprive some students who really need the help, exclude the service to a group of students who (typically) don't attend the wc often, and because of all this, the need for the wc diminishes and then potential tutors would no longer have the opportunity to exercise their English skills by helping others in a professional setting. The writing center serves so many purposes and provides so many services that would be in danger of extinction or, at least, decreased effectiveness if the scope of its clientele were limited.

On a similar note, I think that the direction that writing centers seem to be going in is a good one. Collaboration and a focus on improving writers are excellent goals and achievements. I think that a fitting complement to this current discovery/creation of an effective and helpful identity would be increased advertisement. It seems that so many students still don't know that we exist or don't know what our services are or how to take advantage of them. Some type of advertising campaign or awareness-raising activity might be helpful to centers that are starting to feel comfortable in their own shoes. As North talks about, closets and basements aren't the best places for writing centers. I wonder if there are any other places on Ball State that might be even better locations. What difference does the locale of a writing center have on its clientele?

It seems that there are many different directions/paths that could be followed. I wonder if North is pointing us all to True North.

Out With the Old, In With the New

As good as it felt to turn in the project knowing that I put a fair amount of time into it, I was still a little nervous (and still am) about the grade that I will receive. It'll be good to receive a lot of input and commentary, though, because I know so little about what it takes to make a good video. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the revision process; it'll be interesting to play around with the program more if need be.

Speaking of revision, I worked on the first paper right after it was returned, but I haven't really touched it since. I need to jump on that and figure out what I'm going to improve.

This new assignment seems pretty interesting. Given the demands of all my classes and other tasks in life, I knew that I wanted to try to pair up with someone. Consequently, Cara thought the same thing, and we are now partners, which is good because we already see each other for four hours every week at work. We decided that we'll go to the Learning Center to observe. It'll be interesting to see how/if their practices are different than ours.

Midterm and Peer Review

I was relieved to learn that I did well on the midterm. I had been somewhat worried about it. My only qualm with how I did was that I mis-labeled all of the "may"s in the first section, and it seems like there are a lot when you miss every one. Other than that, I felt pretty good about it.

The Peer Review process was fun. Maybe it's just because I'm a tutor, but I really enjoy brainstorming with people about ways to improve a paper whether it is theirs or my own. It's just fun, dynamic, and synergistic. Particularly, it was fun to work with Travis on his paper. We talked about ways to ridiculously extend his analogy of tutoring and golf. Good times. After the peer review session, I knew that I had a lot of work left to do, and even though I was a little bit nervous about it, I was looking forward to working on it. I've never made a video with this or any other computer program before, so the entire project has been a learning experience in terms of content as well as form. I tried reading the directions for the program, but they were so confusing and irrelevant to what I was trying to immediately do. As it turned out, I just kind of experimented with things and figured it out on my own step by step. It's been frustrating at times but still very interesting and enjoyable.

Review Day

I feel a little nervous about the test, but I think things will work out okay. I've read all of the Grammar Snob, but I don't feel completely solid on all of the rules. As for the parts of speech, I feel comfortable with most of those, with the exception of when certain words can be used in several different ways. I think I have a good grasp on punctuation. The essays should be okay, too. For me, I think the key will be to simply stop myself from getting psyched out by slightly complicated questions. Also, I'll need to take my tame and make sure that I don't just slap down the typical part of speech for a certain word when the context causes it to function in a different manner. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out.

Role Playing and Punctuation Project

Today's punctuation paragraph was interesting. It was quite the project to try to include all of the different marks and all of the different ways that they can be used. It seems like it would be a lot easier to identify them from a piece that was already written they to purposely use them in one's own writing, but it was still fun.

The best part for me was when we read the textbook's tutoring dialogue. Several of the lines seemed really cheesy, but it still provided good insight into what techniques could be beneficial to use in such situations. It was a good springboard into an effective discussion about how to handle people who really haven't done anything to prepare for their assignment. I thought it was funny how, it seemed to me, people gave recommendations of what to do in that circumstance that corresponded to their personalities. I don't know exactly how I would respond, it would probably depend on the exact situation, but I think I'd do all I could to help the student. I also thought it was effective a the beginning of class to address how we would approach the ESL papers. Just discussing the issues in the paper from a detached perspective helped me to evaluate how I work with ESL students. I think that the worst-case scenario would be if an ESL student came in without having done any preparation for their paper... however, I'd imagine that has and will happen on occasion. The techniques discussed today will help: just work with what you have, be positive, and invite them back for more help.