What an odd fucking day.
So, I go in for my office hours as usual. I had cancelled my first class because they have an exam on Thursday and were done reading what I had assigned. I was just hanging out in my office, doing some research, when one of my afternoon students shows up. That class has a paper due today, and she was one of the students who hadn't been ready for last week's in-class peer review. I wasn't expecting much from her.
She had written her paper over the weekend and taken it in to the Writing Center today. Through a series of language-barrier errors (the student is Chinese and still learning English), she told me the Writing Center tutors had refused to help her and had told her to change her topic because she had written about a gay social network.
This set me off. First, tutors do NOT challenge an assignment. Second, the reason she gave sounded like basic homophobia. I talk to my Dept. Head and she writes to the Writing Center director. I have 20 minutes before class starts, so I go over to the library where the Writing Center is. I go up to find the director's office, but on my way, I find my student talking to a tutor. She brings the tutor over to me and I ask (slightly angrily) for her side of things.
Turns out, the problem is one word in the first sentence. There was no homophobia. The tutor had spent 50 minutes working with my student before she came to me, and couldn't get any idea of the assignment from my student. By the time I got to the library, my student had pulled the tutor away from another student who was there for help.
So, this afternoon, I went back up to the Writing Center. I apologized to the W.C. Director, and to the tutor. And ended up talking with the tutor for about an hour.
Did I mention that the tutor is a very intelligent, very attractive graduate student in the English Department?
I made a friend!
Oh, and it turns out that my student speaks better English than she lets on and is trying to game the system. One of the other tutors is an ELL trained teacher and caught her at some inconsistencies.
I am not happy with my student.
So, I go in for my office hours as usual. I had cancelled my first class because they have an exam on Thursday and were done reading what I had assigned. I was just hanging out in my office, doing some research, when one of my afternoon students shows up. That class has a paper due today, and she was one of the students who hadn't been ready for last week's in-class peer review. I wasn't expecting much from her.
She had written her paper over the weekend and taken it in to the Writing Center today. Through a series of language-barrier errors (the student is Chinese and still learning English), she told me the Writing Center tutors had refused to help her and had told her to change her topic because she had written about a gay social network.
This set me off. First, tutors do NOT challenge an assignment. Second, the reason she gave sounded like basic homophobia. I talk to my Dept. Head and she writes to the Writing Center director. I have 20 minutes before class starts, so I go over to the library where the Writing Center is. I go up to find the director's office, but on my way, I find my student talking to a tutor. She brings the tutor over to me and I ask (slightly angrily) for her side of things.
Turns out, the problem is one word in the first sentence. There was no homophobia. The tutor had spent 50 minutes working with my student before she came to me, and couldn't get any idea of the assignment from my student. By the time I got to the library, my student had pulled the tutor away from another student who was there for help.
So, this afternoon, I went back up to the Writing Center. I apologized to the W.C. Director, and to the tutor. And ended up talking with the tutor for about an hour.
Did I mention that the tutor is a very intelligent, very attractive graduate student in the English Department?
I made a friend!
Oh, and it turns out that my student speaks better English than she lets on and is trying to game the system. One of the other tutors is an ELL trained teacher and caught her at some inconsistencies.
I am not happy with my student.
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Second, that's cool about the tutor and that she wasn't actually being whoashitty. Also mega points on the attractiveness and intelligence levels, and the little bonding exercise this ended up being. I mean, so at least there's that.