Our discussion about revision and responding to writing really caught my interest. As a future English teacher, I know that a good amount of my time will be devoted to correcting and responding to student writing. Because of this, I know how crucial it is for me to refine my skills in responding to student writing and to establish an efficient process in which I do so. My time in the ESL center this semester as began this process. Every day I respond to multiple students’ writing and I feel that each student I work with assists me in finding out the most efficient and helpful way to better student writing. That being said, however, I have come across many issues in deciding exactly how to mark student papers. Should I mark every mistake or grammar issue I come across? Should I rewrite sentences for students in a way that I feel works best? Should I focus solely on composition and meaning? I still don’t know that exact answers to these questions, but after reading Richard Haswell’s “Minimal Marking”, I feel that I have developed a better understanding in how to mark students papers in the most useful and efficient way possible.

“Minimal Marking”, explains the method in which Richard Haswell has developed in marking student papers. It is basically a system of symbols and markings that force students to address and fix their own papers. Haswell believes responding to student writing should consist of minimal marking, meaning the amount of marks a teacher makes on a paper is as minimal as possible. Haswell believes that if a teacher heavily marks a student’s paper it only overwhelms the student and reduces the chance of bettering student writing. After thinking about the markings I have made on student’s papers in the ESL Center, this all really began to make sense. I would find myself working through papers and fixing every little thing I saw. I would rewrite sentences; erase mistakes, correct grammar and so on. This led to students simply sitting there and going along with every little thing I said. I was only helping the student’s writing improve on this one paper, and not as a whole. I was taking on the role of an editor more than the role of a tutor. Haswell’s article has provided me with information needed in order force students to think about their writing and improve it without me telling them exactly what to do. Although I am still working on finding the proper balance, as these things don’t come easy, I feel that I am establishing a good base knowledge of how to respond to student writing.

Haswell’s article really interested me so I did a little more research on the idea minimal marking and responding to student writing. Ray Smith’s article, “The Rhetoric of Paper Marking, Or A Wheelbarrow for Sisyphus”, contains a list of things that happen when marking is too abundant. This list has become a set of ideas I think about constantly when working with students. It provides a layout for establishing how to, and how not to, respond to student writing and what happens when you do or don’t do these things.

1.)    There are limits to the amount of commentary to which one can productively attend, particularly when that commentary responds to prose in which one has bared his or her intellect;

2.)    When comments about sentence-level correctness outnumbered comments dealing with matters of substance, my students usually assumed that the aim of essay assignments was to insure sentence-level correctness;

3.)    Correcting their errors led my students to believe that I was to serve as their editor (when they revised)—and, if they did precisely what I asked them to do, they should receive A’s;

4.)    Much of my marking, because it was not explicit in pointing to the difficulty I perceived, could be read as “that’s not the way I (the instructor) would have written it.

As I said before, I am still trying to develop my skills in efficiently responding to student writings; with articles and resources such as these, however, I feel that my skills are slowly establishing.

I was crusing through the google search for grammar quizzes and this one caught my eye. It is a really intense grammar lesson structured in Blackboard learn with multiple resources.

http://www.chompchomp.com/menu.htm

This is a link to  website I found last semester while working on a grammar project. It allows teachers to create personalized grammar lessons for their students. I thought it was an interesting idea.

http://www.noredink.com

It was very fitting to read Muriel Harris’ Collaboration is Not Collaboration is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials Versus Peer-Response Groups, this week being that my tutoring in the ESL Center started on Monday.  As I was reading the article, my recent tutoring sessions in the center ran through my mind throughout. What stood out to me the most were the differences described in roles between tutorials and peer-response group. Now this may seem a little simple or obvious being that this is what most of the article entails, but being that I am in a situation where I feel I am both a tutor and a peer to my tutees, I feel torn between my roles.

The ESL Center is a very informal and comfortable place. Students come in when they please and can ask for help on a variety of things. This is one of the things that I love most about the ESL center. It is an amazing space where I feel great collaborative learning happens. This informality and comfort level, however, creates an atmosphere where it’s easy to feel more like a peer, which technically I am, than a tutor, to the tutees. Although my number of sessions is low and it is only the first week, I’ve found that the line between tutor and peer can be blurred when in a session, especially after reading Harris’ article.  One session in particular stands out to me. A girl came into the ESL center and told me she needed help with a short paper she was writing for a psychology class. I sat down with her and began asking her questions about the assignment so I could familiarize myself with the requirements. In doing so, I found out that this assignment was due in a few hours. This immediately changed the course of the tutoring session. As a tutor, as Harris points out, my job is to facilitate learning and to help improve students writing in the long run. I am not supposed to simply run through the essay and correct every incorrect thing I see, much like peer-response may do. When a student tells me that the essay is due in a few hours, however, I feel an obligation to focus mainly on the correctness of the essay at hand and to leave long term writing improvement instruction aside. I found myself walking the student through the essay and helping her fix the corrections I found.  I was a tutor doing the work of a peer-response.

After thinking more about the previously described session in regards to Harris’ article, I think that it was a more successful session than I had previously imagined. Initially, I felt like no true learning really occurred. I was simply walking through the essay with the student and pointing out things that I felt needed to be changed. Then, however, I remembered a conversation I had with the student about article usage. I had noticed that she had a problem with properly using articles throughout her paper so I stopped and discussed it with her for some time. I used a handout about articles that the ESL Center has a resource and talked her through the rules. This, I feel, was a moment where true tutoring occurred. Even though I spent a good amount of the session acting as what I feel Harris would define as a “peer-response”, it was still beneficial.

As student tutors, I feel that we will all have to learn how to balance roles as peers and tutors. Although this can be difficult, I feel that it is necessary. We must take on our roles as tutors and strive to encourage long term learning, but we also must remember to not be afraid to come down to the peer level. As Harris states: “Given the advantages and disadvantages of tutoring and group work, then, there is indeed a solid argument to be made for helping our students experience and reap the benefits of both forms of collaboration” (381).

While reading through Rodby and Fox’s article, I couldn’t help but relate their findings and ideas to my first year as a college writer. It took me back to those first college writing classes and assignments and forced me to relate my experiences with their research. In doing so, I saw how logical and important their ideas and findings are.  The one section of the article that stood out to me the most was the Emerging Principles about Writing Instruction section. In this section, the authors introduce principles that they have developed throughout their research on first year college writers that they feel must be followed in order to effectively produce successful college writers. The first principle really stood out to me both as a former first year college student and a former educator. Rodby and Fox state: “One learns to participate in a particular writing practice by being engaged in that practice and not by learning some other writing practice with the idea that the latter prepares writers for the former” (88). Through my personal experience as a first year college writer, I know this to be true. Although I did not attend Chico State as a freshman, I had a somewhat similar format as the workshops for first year students. My freshman English class had one professor and two writing tutors who students were assigned to if the content of their writing was not up to par. The writing tutors would have sessions with the students a couple times a week to help them with their papers. After our first paper, I was one of those students assigned to a tutor. We were doing a poetry section and I could not figure out how to analyze the poems and then write about their meaning and significance in a structured way. I remember failing the first assignment in that section and thinking I was never going to graduate college. That was before I began to attend the tutoring sessions, however. Very similar to the workshops here at Chico State, the tutors would help each of us out individually and also have work in groups on the problems we were having with our writing. In doing this, I was able to work hands on with the tutors and my classmates and get the extra instruction I needed in order to better myself as a writer. And I did better myself as a writer. I ended the semester with an A in the class and huge weight lifted. If I was instead sent to a lower level class where we learned to write narratives and compare and contrast essays, I know I would have never gain the skills I needed in order to better myself in that poetry section. As Rodby and Fox state: “…our repeated observations [showed] x did not lead to y” (88). Meaning putting students in a remedial class where “lower” levels of writing were taught did not benefit them as writers in the long run.