Last shadowing session

It took me so long to get this blog post up, but I actually think it's for the better. Due to the work I have reviewed recently I feel better to reflect on past experiences. And that time, the writer who came to the writing center was a "non-traditional" student, no less. The important thing was that, I didn't know that she was a "non-traditional" student until the very last minutes.

I was chatting with my writing consultant as we waited for the writer. The writer was a bit late, and that's unusual according to the experience I have had with the writing center. After 10 minutes, she finally came in. It was an African American woman of an age I could not tell exactly. She also dressed in a fairly...unusual way, and that's despite the extremely diverse fashion in our school. For some reasons I felt uneasy. My consultant however, was as comfortable as usual. The session proceeded. The writer went straight to the point and did not linger much with all the greetings. She claimed that she was frustrated by her paper, having rewritten it many times and still she received an F. That was somewhat frightening to me, for I reckoned the tension would be much higher. To my admiration, my consultant remained unflinching and calm throughout the whole session. She patiently guided the writer through the issues with an easy-going manner and the usual professionalism.

It wasn't until the end that the writer revealed that she was a continuing student. She had been working for sometime, had had children and then returned to school to finished her MA. Although I suspected as much, I was still taken aback. It was true that we had a whole class dedicated on dealing with "non-traditional" students, but nothing we had read or talked about prepared me for this. It was due simply to one fact: all such readings had been based on the assumption that we know the writer is a "non-traditional" student by the time he/she came in. Obviously this was not the case.