I would like to begin this post my sharing the one of the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. I was at d-hall prior to having to be at the Commons to meet with the student again that I had met with earlier in the semester to consult with her on her college admissions essay. I had just filled a mug with steaming hot coffee and was taking my tray of eggs, bacon, and some other incredibly unhealthy breakfast food to sit back at my table. Before I knew it, I was on the FLOOR in front of what seemed to be a million people during prime d-hall time because I had slipped and fell, pouring my food and coffee ALL over myself and the floor with a lovely loud crashing noise to accompany my fall. About 5 people came over to see if I was okay and see if "needed any medical attention" but I told them I was fine minus the fact that I was thoroughly humiliated. So the point of this story is that I reeked of coffee and eggs during my session with the student but nevertheless, it still went very well!
We grabbed two chairs to sit down and discuss her essay and right away I began the session by telling her about my traumatic d-hall experience and warning her about my stench. At least as a positive to what had happened to me earlier that morning, it nice being able to easily have something to use to start things off and create a comfortable environment because I could tell she found the story pretty funny.
She took out a copy of her "main" essay that she wanted me to review. I don't quite remember exactly, but the topic was something along the lines of "write about an experience in which you've overcome an obstacle". Luckily, as I had learned the first time I worked with her, this student was not stumped with what to write about; she had plenty of valuable content to share because unfortunately, she had spent half of her life living in Afghanistan under harsh Taliban control. In this essay, she began with a very intriguing opening paragraph that described her limitations in life and later on in the essay, got more specific and connected her story with her future goals and aspirations. It was beautifully written so as a writing consultant, my job was easy for the most part. I asked her what she wanted to work on and she said that it was a little too long for the word limit so we decided to go paragraph by paragraph and find sentences that were either repetitive or too wordy. Working paragraph by paragraph was a great tactic to go about reviewing her paper with her and as we did, I read every sentence aloud. This helped us indicate areas or sentences that were a little unclear as well as places where she had conflicting verb tenses. Another thing I didn't even pay attention to until mid-way through writing this blog post was that she is an ESL student. The fact that she has gone to high school here is a possible explanation, but both times I was working with her I never really realized any struggles that arose from a language or culture barrier. At the end of the session, she expressed a lot gratitude and I could tell that she got a lot out of our 45 minute meeting which was a good feeling. I really enjoyed this experience because the student had a lot of interesting in working with me and I could truly sense the positive resulting benefits to both her and I. A final observation I'd like to note is that the last time I had worked with this young girl, another student from our class was working with me but this time it was only her and me and I could tell that by just having one person working with her, she felt less intimidated and more connected and engaged. To reiterate, I think this was a great opportunity and it really felt like a real consultation to me.
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