Wordle!

Today’s class was great! It doesn’t get much better than metaphors and Wordle!! Although I struggled with the advisor metaphors, I thought it was a neat way to think about myself as a person, student, and tutor. I would love to hear what crazy comparisons the rest of the class came up with!

Ok, on to Wordle. I have never seen or heard of this website before, but I thought the collages were so cool! Keeping with our metaphorical/symbolic class today, I am going to attempt to decipher what my wordle means to me.

At first glance, you will clearly see the large font with the word BRANDON. This, of course, was the name of the English 101 student that I worked with. I was kind of surprised and embarrassed that this was the focal point of my reflection. However, I think the student is a very important component of any session. Of course, you need a writer to have a session, but they do control both what you talk about and how the session will progress. With that said, you have to work with their personality, strengths, and weaknesses. For me, Brandon was a challenge, so including his name in my reflection is not surprising.  I did my best to work with Brandon in a way that would benefit his writing; I was extremely outgoing and supportive.

The next bolded words on my collage were: time, ideas, session, and approach. I think these are legitimate points to think about, and can be the difference between a productive and nonproductive session.  If you don’t consider time, the rest of your schedule has to be adjusted.  If you lack a strategy/approach and a sense of direction for the session, then your writer will leave feeling confused about how to finish their paper.  In relation to my session, one of my biggest concerns was time—Brandon and I worked for 80 minutes.  Although I think this was a necessary amount of time, I wrote about how I was concerned for future sessions.  What if time is an issue and I really can’t help the writer to the extent that I know I could if I had more time?  I know you can always schedule another appointment, but I fear losing the important conversation that you ended with in the previous session.  In addition, I was continuously analyzing my approach.  I tried engaging Brandon with questions, helping him reword sentences, and focusing our attention on an outline for his paper.  I think these strategies had great value, but I was still contemplating how to handle the scenario.  I guess time and experience will help ease the anxiety.  For now, I’ll just continue to learn, and use Wordle….because it’s so cool!