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Hey Kendra. This is Walter. Thought I should say that for clarification, even though I think we already shared this.

Enjoy your writing by being open to inspirations

(I wrote this a while ago, but posted it now. Please excuse the outdated parts. I assure you the message is still relevant.)

After several attempts of troubleshooting and appreciative but unavailing help, I welcome you all to my brain although many may not agree with what goes on in here. It is finally the week of Homecoming along with midterms. I commend the university for that unconventional combination and apparently the dark humor that influenced this decision. Nonetheless, whichever activities you choose as a priority, I promote the existence of writing. Anything can be a source of inspiration for writing if you allow it. I have engaged in that openness in several unorthodox activities. That ultimately helped with my writing samples. For example, I went to a gathering with a couple of my friends. What made it unusual was the fact that I didn’t know most of the people, however, we were talking for what seemed to be hours. The next day, I went into my tutoring session about an hour earlier than usual. I sat down and opened my notebook and wrote a two-page story within that hour. It was a story of children in a playground, but my adult friends were the inspiration behind it. I used their experiences with life and relationships to conjure up a replica of the innocence that they were involved in. In order to manifest the innocence of their nature into a comprehensive story, I morphed my friends into children and totally refabricated the story into an age-appropriate setting for the main characters. I still read the story several times only to laugh at my innuendos and it turned out to be one of my favorites. I encourage you to do the same! Even if you are involved with something that you absolutely love, or if it is something that you completely detest, expound on that. It is those emotions that you feel that will add the respected realism to your story that people love to relate to when reading. It is when you find that heart-felt connection with your writing that you will finally enjoy the sport. Happy writing everyone!

Writing Pedagogy

As you probably were, I was a bit daunted by the task of a writing pedagogy. I've never written one. Eventually I just followed the instructions on the PDF file provided and BB and it walked me through the process. We did not however get an example pedagogy to base ours on. This would have been quite helpful.

After turning in the rough draft, which I was very pleased with, I noticed that it was to be written on our tutoring philosophy, and not teaching philosophy. I really hope I'm not penalized for this, as I really feel like I have much more to say about teaching over tutoring.

I would really like to get some feedback from my rough draft so I can see how much work I have ahead of me in editing it and perfecting it. It definitely came out longer than I thought it would, and I feel like I discovered much about my teaching methods.

experience in RWC

I've got to admit, my favorite part of the class was definitely tutoring. It was a bit of a rough start though; there were two or three sessions I went to in which I sat there for two hours doing nothing because no one had scheduled an appointment with me. I felt like everyone else was getting the experience except for me, and felt that perhaps I was falling behind. I wish there was a cut off time, and if no one had scheduled with you to that point, you wouldn't have to show up. I never had a walk in during my whole experience tutoring.

Once the tutoring actually started, I feel like I picked up on it pretty quickly. I learned how to speak to people, and how to present myself. Not as a final authority on a paper, but rather a test audience to read through the paper together. I noticed that students where a bit surprised by my simplistic approach, but that they were receptive to it.

My most challenging session was one with a student who was in the final stages of a very long and dense paper on Greek mythology, a topic I'm not too well versed in. The paper seemed to be alright, although did have some issues, but the main problem was that it was so long we could not get through even half of it. I felt bad, but had to stop our session when my other tutor walked in. Another challenge was a student writing about social work who didn't want to go over content, but instead wanted me to "make sure" that her paper was in proper AMA format, again something I knew very little about. In the process I noticed some major problems in the content and presentation of her paper, but she didn't want to deal with that. She wanted to stick to format, so we basically just read through Perdue Owl together. At least I learned a bit about that format.

Best Experiences

With this week and the past few being so crazy with finals, papers, and all that jazz I thought everyone could use some positivity. This past Friday I had what I feel was probably my best tutoring session to date and felt so incredibly proud that I just wanted to share with everyone!

I saw the woman's name and her short little blurb of what she wanted to work on, all it said was "Doctorate lecture." Immediately, I began to get nervous. I'm a senior but still, I'm an undergrad. How could I possibly help this poor woman with her doctorate lecture? What even was that? She showed up early to her appointment and told me right away she was from Russia and English was her second language. Talk about another *gulp* moment for me! In perfect English however, she described to me exactly what her doctoral lecture was and basically she was giving a little speech/presentation before she would play the violin for the doctorate panel. Right off the bat she said she needed help with pronunciation of some of the words and knew some sentences were off but she was not sure how to fix them/make them sound more natural. Luckily it was an hour appointment, so she read the speech out loud for me and we stopped when there were problems. A lot of the time when I stopped her, she pointed out exactly what was wrong before I even had to ask if she thought what sounded strange. I tried to not be too directive and only had to be a handful of times when she just couldn't find the correct work/thought. Since she was my last appointment of the day (my next class had been cancelled), I offered to stay an extra 5 minutes since we were literally on her conclusion when time ran out.

As we were wrapping up and I asked her for any last minute concerns, she began saying that I shouldn't have stayed later than I had to and trying to get me out of there but I told her I really wanted to help her finish. She actually teared up a bit as she was getting ready to leave. The lady shook my hand and thanked me a million times. At one point I said I hoped I had helped her out and she just gave me this smile, it made everything so worth it. She looked so happy, reassuring me that I had helped her so much and she did not feel so nervous and scared about her speech and how much less stress she felt now. I helped her book one final appointment for this coming week so she can practice it on someone else but the final thing that made me so happy was she requested me! Unfortunately, it wasn't in her schedule to get at my time again but just the fact she thought of me was amazing. Sorry this turned out incredibly long but it really just was such a special experience. I truly felt like everything we've worked so hard for this semester came to fruition!

So now I'd love for you guys to share your favorite/best experience in the RWC! I have a few others but limited myself to one for now :)

Stressy Stress Stress Yes

The problem with having awesomesauce students is that there isn't really much to say. Most of them are pretty quiet, but I tend to get a few more vocal ones as I said earlier. So when it comes to the issue of tutoring, I've hit quite the writer's block. I thought I was going to get some interesting experience today, but in fact, today was rather chaotic and I had not one, but two walk-ins after a grad student made an hour long appointment, dropped, had an even more advanced level grad student replace her, and for him to cancel the appointment. I guess we're in that stressful time of year then, where decisions are made at the last minute and there is no turning back. The same goes for this class.

I asked Kendra the other day if we can put class/project related experiences in the blog and she said that yes, we could, since it helped contribute to the essence of the class.

I'm deeply invested in the art of tutoring and I'm interesting in knowing all about what makes FSU's writing center unique. I notice that every other week, it seems to expand. More opportunities are given at a wider range and I decided to make a newsletter. Overall, I had fun writing my articles and I had channeled my inner journalist, as I never had any experience with even the newspaper club in my high school, but my findings were pretty interesting.

For one, Dr. Wells is trying to make several different ways to have grad students tutor the grad students themselves. So that means that people like myself and Kati-Morgan below me won't have to worry about the questions they have for content in whichever thesis/dissertation they're in trouble with. However, like Kati-Morgan said, sometimes they book appointments with us for the purpose of grammar checking and to see if their sentences don't seem awkward, so common sense can really be utilized in these aspects.

The second finding in my project was that the tutor I had interviewed told me for his funny story was that he had these two guys walk in who asked him if he could help them use Photoshop to make counterfeit Two Chainz tickets.

I am not kidding. As you can imagine, I couldn't stop laughing for a while sometime. I mean, how can someone just walk in and do that? Do they go, "hey, I need tickets to go to this concert and I think I can get them done here." or some other scenario.

It's so funny doing this project, since I had managed to use three hours of tutoring up at the digital center while using InDesign, which was pretty tricky software. I think it was the trickiness of InDesign that made me crack, as the version they have in Williams Digital Studio isn't the same as the one in Stroizer or in Johnston, which brought some problems (mostly in printing) for me. I thought that overall this project was a great way to conclude this class, since I wanted to showcase my creativity (and using our crazy unicorn manatee mascot as the logo, which I love) and I realized that taking this class was indeed stressful, but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

So what about you guys? Which project was the most fun you had in the class doing? Was it for your final? The narrative? The group project? Grammar file? Were they about as stressful to you as well? Are you just about as surprised as I am that someone tried to use our services for fake Two Chainz tickets? Any crazy/funny stories (like that hot chick Mayowa had)?