by Natalie Harrell

Although I did not meet in person with my student to talk about her essays, I think we still were able to get a lot of work done despite the obvious barrier. While I feel this experience would be exponentially different if we were able to meet in person, this was still beneficial to me. The coolest thing and one of my favorite things to see during this experience was my student improving upon her writing in such a short amount of time. She had a series of short, 250-word, essays she was required to write for the schools she was applying to and she wrote one, I gave feedback, and she fixed this on that specific essay and I did not see the same pattern in the next essay. To see her improve made the entire experience worthwhile, despite the challenges.

            I have always loved to write and I also have always read a lot, which invariably improves one’s writing. I have never had a ‘hard’ time writing, and so it was interesting to see someone, who arguably is on the opposite side of the educational spectrum to me in terms of subject area (she is much more science oriented) not able to come up with ideas for a paper as easily as I could. Of course, I have been in her shoes before, writing college essays for schools, and I have several years of writing experience on her. To see that not everyone writes in the same way as I do, including the process of brainstorming, was a good learning experience for me. Throughout this course, LANG 396, I have read several articles on the idea of how much feedback is too much feedback, so before leaving a single comment on my student’s paper I asked her if she likes a lot of comments or if this overwhelms her. She preferred a lot of comments on her work and so that is what I did for her, and of course it may be a bit more difficult to do this in an actual classroom with thirty students, but this helped her and I could see how the comments helped her.

Personally, I had to set aside my own wants of completely re-writing what she had written. Especially because these essays had word limits and they are quite personal I could not tell her exactly what she should or should not do and expect her to feel comfortable sharing these details. I feel like I learned how to be patient with the student throughout this entire experience, and if we met more than we did or for longer I would have developed this skill more, but I feel like I have really built the foundation of patience.  

When writing one of her essays, my student mentioned that the honors and AP classes at her school are lacking in diversity and this is exactly how my own honors and AP classes were. This begs the question, how much of this falls on the teachers, and I think a lot of it does. In one of my classes we talk a lot about implicit bias and how to actively fight against this and I think that this is something I need to do in the classroom, and every teacher should do, to ensure no child gets left behind or forgotten just because the teacher does not see themselves in the student. Likewise, at least in the school I attended, the teachers chose for the students what classes they would be placed into and if you are not placed into an honors class then you have to jump through hoops just to get there. If teachers are disproportionately placing students in classes they should not be in because of the teachers implicit bias and not based on the students capabilities then they are greatly doing their students a disservice. We talked a lot about the bubble of inclusivity that Asheville is but also noted the parts of Asheville that are not so inclusive.

This whole process has taught me a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses, how to address these, and how I want to teach writing in the future; but at the end of the day, this helped me build the foundation of my ‘teacher persona’ and I feel there is still much room for improvement.