Re: bawking

[bobbie silk <bsilk@keller.clarke.edu>]

Don (not Dawn?), as a quick aside and eventhough there are times when I
wouldn't mind being considered to have b**ls, I have to tell you that this
Bobbie is female.

I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying about context.  I do
understand that "prevention is worth a pound of cure," but few writers
come to us as true beginners.  If we're shifting our metaphors from
medicine and physical therapy to nutrition, most of our clients come to
us after years of the Standard American Diet (SAD).  They think mashed
potatoes, peas, and cream corn are the only palatable vegetables.  I
suppose, picking up on your experience with Macrobiotics, we could say
that the writers who come to the Writing Center have to be taught both the
value of a changing their diet and how to appreciate the taste of miso,
gomasio, and sea-vegetables (aka seaweed).  Too often, though, what brings
one to the point of changing life-long eating habits is illness.  So we're
kind of stuck with the illness/medicine metaphor again.

I'm also not sure how we could apply the nutrition analogy to already
successful writers--is it what they have consumed that has made them
successful?  Since they are frequently offered the same writing "meals" in
school as the students who aren't successful writers, why is their writing
"healthy" and the writing of the other students "sickly"? 

Nutrition could be an informative metaphor, I think, but I'm having some
difficulty making it work in relation to writing centers.  Suggestions?

  --Bobbie

On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Don Socha wrote:

> Of course it's been a while, but what bobbie silk wrote came up on my screen today
> anyway, and I had some I think related concerns.  For example, when he states:
> 
> > I might accept an analogy between physical therapy and writing center work
> > before I'd accept the medical analogy.
> 
> I wonder if the realm of physical therapy addresses questions of context in the
> ways I am currently concerned with.  For example, when colleagues and the students
> themselves use the medical analogy (and it is most important, I think, to address
> the ways in which this occurs contextually on the subconcious level), though:
> 
> >  it serves their self-interested perception of the
> > situation...
> 
> ...in that
> 
> >  The faculty member wants someone else to cure this writer's
> > ills so that s/he can be more efficient in grading what s/he thinks is
> > important (the old misconception of separating content and articulation)...
> 
> Why "the student" is motivated to
> 
> > ...want a "cure" because it implies a "magic bullet," a
> > simple and painless adjustment that doesn't take much time or tinker with
> > the student's mind
> 
> has more to do with, or can perhaps best be addressed at, the initially
> subconscious level of the context in which student writers first locate themselves
> in the writing process.  What I think I'm getting at is something learned through
> working with whole foods and macrobiotics for more than a decade, which may be
> inadequately summed by the familiar expression:  'an ounce of prevention is worth
> a pound of cure;' be it slash and burn or therapeutic.  --ds
> 
>