Re: requiring wc visits

[gillespiep@vms.csd.mu.edu]

On Sun, 3 Nov 1996, Muriel Harris wrote: > And a question: What do you
think of the frontal approach to students > who don't want to be there,
have nothing they want to talk about, and > still have to have that damned
"note from a tutor"...namely, that > after a few minutes of trying to
engage them, we just sign the slip > and let them go. Any thoughts? >
Mickey, that's been exactly our approach, and whenever this comes up, we
phone the instructor and make our policy clear, that we won't force
tutoring on reluctant students; instructors have been uniformly positive
about this policy.  At the moment we only have one instructor who requires
his twenty students to come in, and next semester, if he does it again, we
have agreed that he and I would sit down with our schedule, that possibly
I'll come to his class with the schedule book and sign students up, and
that maybe he'll require that they have a WC deadline a few days in
advance of the paper's due date.  I think that the students who are the
hardest to win over are those who are fitting the visit in hours before
the paper is due.  Depending on his assignment and his goals for it, I
might ask the instructor to attend one of our staff meetings and talk it
through with us. Joan Mullin suggested some of these strategies a month or
so ago, and I think her guidelines were wonderfully useful. 

I, too, like the chance to reconsider this question.  Some of us have 
tried new things we can report on.  And we have new voices to join in the 
discussion.  

Paula Gillespie