In response to Exercise 5A: “If you have not yet tutored, think about yourself over the past year. What personal concerns have you had, and how did they affect you as a writer?’ (52)
I don’t have to think back very far. Just last weekend, I had a fairly severe crisis involving my coping with stress and how much was on my plate. It came to the point that on Friday nigtht, I had to sleep 15 hours, meaning I slept most of Saturday. My stress bled into Sunday, causing me to be sick most of the day. Unfortunately, I had a paper due Tuesday with not much time on Monday to write it. I wound up staying up really late on Monday night writing the rough draft to this paper, and unfortunately, it was a very rough draft, with not a lot of analysis that I know is necessary for the final draft. In fact, I was at the researching stage still when I traded rough drafts with my partner.
So, coping with stress and having a shut-down really affected my writing for that paper. It had also affected my writing in general, as I had been so busy that I hadn’t taken time to write as much as I would have liked…even journalistic blogging had fallen to the wayside. I still did it, but not to the same degree. Now that I’ve dealt with the stressor and decided to cut back (dropping an internship), I feel much better and much freer to write.
I already knew that it was hard to write when something else is consuming your mind, but this was a rather rude way to have to realize it again. Luckily, the final for that paper isn’t due for a week, so I have some time to revise and rework the paper, as well as start my analysis, and to go to the Writing Center.
Experiences like this should help you be sympathetic to those students who show up at the Writing Center with last minute efforts. (Not that you’d be unsympathetic, of course, especially with your counseling background!)
It’s true that some students put their work off when they have time to do it. But often that’s not the case. This term I’m teaching a 65-student section of ENG 104 (Intro to fiction), and it’s a reminder to me of how difficult students’ lives can be. There’s the student who is the first from her family to go to college who works a 40 hour a week graveyard shift with required overtime two weekends out of each month. She seems to really care about the class, but she’s working 40 hours a week and taking a full load.
There’s the student whose mother is dying of cancer. The student who can’t decide whether to stay in college. The single mother whose daughter asked a fellow student for an aspirin–something she shouldn’t have done; you’re only supposed to get aspirin from the main office–and was given crystal meth instead. Not only was the student rushed to the emergency room but she is being charged with a meth felony. I was really impressed with the mother at the start of the class, but she didn’t turn in her first writing assignment and hasn’t been in class for the last four class sessions.
Your reflection is such a reminder that we can never know what’s really going on in other people’s lives.
Lisa