New start tomorrow

School starts for me tomorrow, and I'm way excited. I'm teaching two sections of my favorite course--English 111, an accelerated English 101-102 combo. I've taught it four or five times since I've been here, and each time I've had a number of students whose writing just knocked my socks off.

Can't wait.

I'll be blogging with these students, so I'll have a bunch of new readers here. Hi, new readers! Glad to have you!

Magic

Anna at soccer games last year: She's the kid most likely to be facing the wrong direction. The one who's more interested in her attire than the game. The one, bless her little heart, crossing the center line when she's not supposed to. The one who occassionally runs toward the ball but then is too timid to actually kick it. The one whose feet make contact with the ball maybe six or seven times the whole season. By accident. The one who whose favorite part of the game is the time spent on the sidelines, cheering.

Anna at her first soccer game this year (today): She's the one playing defense, the one scanning the field and anticipating where the ball is headed. The one who understands that she needs to back up her best friend M, the other defender. The one who kicks the ball over and over, in the right direction! The one who actually goes after the ball! The one with the ginormous smile on her face the whole time!

I was stunned. Absolutely stunned. How did this happen?!!

When the game was over, we praised her to the sky. Especially for the smile, for having had fun--FUN!--out there.

Later, driving home from the grocery store, she said, "Mom, I really was good out there today, wasn't I?"

"Yes!" I said.

"It felt magical," she said. "It felt like a magical moment."

The difference a year makes.

"A Monster Without a Head"

Writing Center stuff is on my mind right now, and I figure the blog's as good a place as any to start sorting it out. (Well, actually, a better place, since I can get feedback.)

I just finished this book about writing-center and writing-program management. One recommendation that several of the contributors make--and it's pretty commonsensical--is that newbie coordinators/directors start by categorizing and prioritizing the various issues they face. So that's something I need to do.

It ain't pretty. In many ways, in fact, our writing center is kind of a mess. The comment I've heard most often from colleagues this summer: "Hey, I hear you're taking over the writing center. Good luck with that. I don't envy you at all."

Umm, thanks?

The mess isn't at all the fault of the previous coordinator. It's way more institutional than that. Just one "little" example: for almost the entire past academic year, full-time unionized faculty were operating under a "Work to the Rule" situation in protest of our administration's refusal to negotiate a new contract. That is, we stopped doing "extra" work--committee work, lead-instructor work, coordinator work, etc. So there was no writing center coordinator for almost a year. The center remained open, the tutors--all adjuncts teaching in our writing program--continued to tutor, and our department secretary handled the bare-minimum administrative tasks. The center survived, but it was, as one of the tutors described it to me recently, "a monster without a head."

Work to the Rule ended--unsuccessfully for us union folks--in June. My department chair retired that month, and all kinds of roles got shifted around. Hence, the writing center job opened up.

Anyway, I've spent the last couple of months talking informally with our tutors (and others)about our center: finding out what works, what could be improved, etc. I have WAY more to find out, but here's what I'm hearing so far:

Personnel

• There've been no training or professional-development opportunities for tutors for at least the past year.
• There've been no staff meetings for at least a year.
• We have no official receptionist. If a tutor happens to have an open slot, he/she helps students sign in, answers the phone, etc. But too often, all tutors are busy working with students.
• Many tutors don't know each other; they want a stronger sense of collegiality.
• Some tutors need to work on interpersonal skills (or, as several people termed it, "customer-care skills").

Record Keeping

• My (new) department chair wants better record keeping--more data about who visits the center, what skills they work on, what college division they're coming from, etc. (I should mention that my department chair served as writing center coordinator in the nineties, and she diligently gathered these kinds of statistics; apparently, they haven't been gathered in any useful way since then.)
• All record keeping--from sign-in forms to tutor-report forms, etc.--is done by paper. Last year, the school purchased and installed AccuTrack software so that we could keep records electronically, but nobody's figured out how to use the software yet. (See the Work to the Rule discussion above.)

Philosophy and Policies

• ESL issues: Huge, huge concern among many tutors and teachers. Most tutors feel woefully undertrained in dealing with ESL issues. To make matters worse, there've been major miscommunication problems between the writing center and the ESL tutoring center, often resulting in students getting shuffled back and forth between the two centers.
• Approaches to grammar instruction: Since its inception in the eighties, our center has had a clearly-advertised policy about not being a "proofreading service." Apparently, though, some tutors interpret the policy to mean that they're not supposed to help students with sentence-level concerns at all. Other tutors, according to some reports, do nothing but mark up errors on students' papers.

Technology

• The center has just two computers--one Mac and one PC. The PC doesn't have Word installed on it. (???!)
• See "record keeping" category above.

Space

• The center shares space with the Math Lab, the ESL Tutoring Center, and the Science Tutoring Center. It's LOUD in there.

Other
(These items haven't really come up in discussions, but they're things I'd love to see happen. Some day.)

• The addition of peer tutors. (Right now, all tutors are adjuncts teaching in our writing program.)
• Greater sense of the writing center as campus resource (e.g., offering workshops to faculty across disciplines, especially since we don't have a WAC program.)

Whew.

Okay, next up: prioritizing.

Any thoughts?

Good stuff this week

• Our smart, wonderful, generous IT person restored a Blackboard course of mine from last fall, saving me tons of work this weekend as I prepare for classes to start. (Of course, I promised to never, ever, ever forget to archive a Bb course again!)
• Got two 4C's proposals accepted--a panel and a workshop. I've never done two presentations at one 4C's, so this should be interesting.
• Went to a high-school football game last night, and the underdog inner-city team (with the most amazing and unusual marching band I've ever seen) WON!
• Finished my first-ever writing center tutor schedule. Not everybody will get the exact hours they wanted, but at least everybody will get something they wanted.
• Ran three times this week.
• Caught up on a few people's blogs (still have many to go, though).

To do: fall 06

School starts back up for me on Sept. 20. A round-up of what I need to do this quarter:

In the next two weeks:

• Clean/ straighten my office at work.
• Clean out/ organize my computer desktop at work.
• Get my syllabi together (two comp classes; one first-year seminar).
• Tackle the writing center: finish schedule for fall; update website; hold staff meeting; etc. (I don't think I've mentioned here that I'm going to be our new writing center coordinator, starting in the fall. I'll need lots of advice from Pi!).
• Do a gazillion tasks for MDD (acronym for a project my colleagues and I do every fall with GED students).
• Get back into the blog thing--writing and reading. (I've been so bad in this regard--I didn't even know that Shelly got a full-time job until she mentioned it in comments here!)

The rest of the quarter:

• Finish a draft of an article I promised someone.
• Get my talk together for a conference in October.
• Start putting together my tenure portfolio. (OMG, Ing!!! I almost forgot to put this one on the list!)
• Tackle more writing center stuff: AccuTrack training, ESL stuff, housekeeping, etc.
• Do a gazillion more tasks for MDD.
• Maintain the blog thing.

Reality check

Just when I think, "Wow, I'm the mother of two school-age kids; this parenting thing's gotta get easier now," the older child yells this from the bathroom:

"Mom, can you wipe my butt? I had a really, really bad poop."

First days

My first day of kindergarten, 1973:



















Kate's first day of kindergarten, 2006:















She doesn't have quite the "scared shitless look" (my mom's description of my first-day photo) that I had.

Kate's had a few tears each morning so far, but when I pick her up at the end of the day, the report's always good. Knock-on-wood.