Re: she said that?!

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

Katie, I think this is something we will have to contend with as long as
academics--and our society as a whole--persists in pathologizing student
writing rather than thinking in terms of growth and development and
learning to adjust to new and more complex demands at each stage of one's
education. But I'd also like to suggest that the medical analogy may be a
mark of respect rather than mere dismisal.  I have a confession to make,
in fact.

I first started teaching composition in the fall of 1984 when, as a brand
new Ph.D. in Linquistics (historical and Indo-European), I was hired by
the English department at Rutgers Camden for a one-year replacement
position. Although I was hired to teach grammar, linguistics, and
sociolinguistics, like everyone else, I was expected to tech fY
composition.  Rutgers Camden had a writing center--a concept I hadn't
encountered previously--and I thought it was a wonderful idea--specialists
in writing to help my students. I never got any kind of "users' manual"
for the writing center, however, and I'm afraid I'm guilty of perpetuating
the medical myth. 

Many of my students had survived the Camden school system,
which suffered from all of the problems that inner city urban schools
face, and although I never taught a course explicitly labled "basic
writing," many of my students in FY comp were still struggling with the
demands of reading and writing standard English.  I could use my training
as a linguist to get some sense of the possible origins of a surface
problem (e.g. I knew the various linguistic explanations for why native
speakers of Spanish, Vietnamese, or Afro-American English had trouble
marking verb tense consistently).  But I had NO idea how to go about
teaching someone to do this.  We had referral forms for the writing
center, and if I wanted a student to go to the writing center, I'd talk to
him/her in a conference, and fill out the referral form in the stuedent's
presence.  I'd explain that I wasn't suggesting the writing center because
I thought the student was stupid or anything like that, but because (s)he
had problems that I didn't know how to help with.  I'd use a medical
analogy, explaining that if the the student had gone to her family doctor
with a bad knee, the doctor might refer her to an orthopedic
specialist--someone with the specialized training to address the problem
effectively.  I'd also "reserve" discussions of developing and revising
ideas for conferences with me, not because I thought that this was
higher-level stuff that only the prof could do, but because it was the
part I knew I could handle.  


 Sara Kimball
UT Austin




On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Latisha LaRue wrote:

> Recently, one of the visitors in our Writing Lab told us she'd been told
> by her teacher to "visit the Writing Lab.  It's sort of like a grammar and
> writing clinic in there, an ER of sorts."  I found it curious that faculty
> outside the lab were creating such images for their students.  I am
> curious about whether any of the rest of you have experienced such
> reflections on your writing centers/labs/places?  Whether from faculty,
> administrators, other students--what images or metaphors or descriptors
> have you heard used to define your places or what you do?  How did you
> find that those fit/distorted how you see yourselves, your places, and
> your work?
> 
> Thanks for sharing;-)
> 
> Katie (from the cornfields where the harvest is overly rich this year)
> 
>