Tuesday 17 February 2015

Mentoring students at Hawthorne

What an experience to get ourselves in to a school and work on helping students with their writing process. The nerves built up over the preceding weeks as I wondered what I was getting myself into. I questioned my capabilities of being a mentor for a young student. Do I have what it takes to help someone get better at writing? There is an automaticity to my writing which comes with years of practice. If I don't even understand my own procedures, how could I possibly improve someone else's? However, I quickly came to realize that the tricks and procedures which I have come to think of as automatic are easily accessed if I am being prompted to think about them.

So Monday, we walked into the class nervous and excited to get into the work. When it came time to pair up, the nerves went away as they normally do once I am set into action. I was placed with  an outgoing and funny young girl whose writing has a lot of room for potential. Although I wanted to take that first half hour to get to know her on a more personal level, she is all business. I was there to help her get better at writing, and she saw no point in wasting time going through the regular formalities. A quick introduction was enough to set the wheels in motion and start working on making her writing better. She spoke about her desire to increase her vocabulary, and to be able to express her opinions using "big fancy words." So we spoke about using a thesaurus while writing, subscribing to a word calender, and increasing her vocabulary by looking up any words she doesn't know while reading. More importantly, I tried to convey the idea that fancy wording can sometimes take away from the overall efficiency of one's writing. We spoke about working with the vocabulary she already possesses to make sure she is properly explaining her ideas in a coherent manner. I used my sister, who writes government documents for a living, as an example. Her job is to express the meaning and intentions of the policies into words which are accessible to everyone. Her work must be well crafted, but it also exemplifies the importance of conveying meaning efficiently.

Aside from vocabulary, she struggled to locate the exact places where she most needed improvement. But one thing became blatantly obvious about her writing as we spoke. She lacks confidence in what she writes, and how she writes it. She would say "this person does this better than me" or "I'm not very good at that." There is a level of anxiety which she gets when she even thinks about her writing because she is always comparing herself to her peers. We spoke about seeing her classmates as resources rather than competition. I told her that if she sees someone else doing something better than her, talk to them about what they are doing. Ask them about their procedures, and show them some of her own writing to see if they can improve upon it. I also spoke with her about being proud of, and focusing only on her own development. If we think  about it as a correlation chart, she is always comparing herself to someone else, and both her and her comparison are constantly improving. But she is only looking at the fact that she is still behind where the other person is. Looking at it that way, she won't ever look at her own improvements and be proud of what she has achieved.

Looking over her writing, there are some grammar and thought organization issues which we can improve upon. I left her the following quote in an email about the best way to improve her writing:

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh


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