Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can't Help

Steve Sherwood

doi:10.7771/2832-9414.1340

Writing Center Journal 1996 web Open Access

Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can't Help

Steve Sherwood

Abstract

Most of us can recall the clients who got away, the ones who needed our help but left the writing center without getting it. Perhaps my own most glaring failure was Byron, a returning student whom I suspect suffered from a number of what we now call learning disabilities. I was a new graduate student when Byron first came to see me with a paper full of starts and stops, logical inconsistencies, and randomly chosen words. He asked if he could record our conversation, explaining that an accident had left him with an impaired short-term memory. The tape recorder sounded like a good idea. But as I commented about particular aspects of his paper, Byron frequently stopped the tape, rewound and replayed my earlier remarks. These unpredictable interruptions were unnerving and derailed my train of thought. I would leave out points I'd intended to mention and lose touch with insights I'd had about his essays. I probably should have seen our fragmented sessions together, which moved with the same jolting starts and stops as his prose, as a window into Byron's thinking and writing processes (and perhaps the key to solving his problems, assuming they could be solved). Instead, Byron's eccentric use of the tape recorder unsettled and frustrated me, as did his perhaps related difficulty with modulating his voice and keeping his balance (sometimes he would literally fall out of his chair). We worked for hours at a time, over most of two academic quarters, and made little detectable progress in his writing. I had no training in helping students cope with learning disabilities, much less with the effects of a severe brain injury. With good reason, I felt incapable of assisting Byron. And so he and I suffered together until one day, after plaintively wondering if he would ever get it,

Journal: Writing Center Journal
Published: 1996
DOI: 10.7771/2832-9414.1340
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Open Access: OA PDF Gold
Topics: graduate education writing centers
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Cited by in this index (1)

Brizee et al. (2012)

Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach, Par…

Computers and Composition

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Apprenticed to Failure: Learning from the Students We Can't Help

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