Wednesday, September 30, 2009

9/21 Julie Neff "Learning Diabilities and the Writing Center"

What were your reactions to this reading? How might these ideas help you as a tutor? How might these ideas help you as a writer?

2 comments:

  1. I haven't yet dealt with any students with documented (or hidden) learning disabilities, but having heard stories from other tutors, I know there is one thing that would help these tutors more than anything else in helping these students: knowing the documented disability, and being able to learn ways to cope with the different ways of learning.

    If we had a better communication with Disability Services, in order to learn ahead of the tutoring session what the disability is and methods to cope within the tutoring session, sessions may go smoother and students may learn easier and quicker.

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  2. I really liked the section on learning disabilities, especially how it gave very concrete examples on how to be encouraging and direct--what an LD student, in particular, needs. However, I did want to query the word choice in one example of the dialogue between the Writing Advisor and David (244-246). On page 245, I do agree that the tutor/Writing Advisor should be encouraging, but I think saying "This is going to be a wonderful paper" predicts the future too much. I think better wording might be, "This has the MAKINGS of a wonderful paper." This way if there were additional problems between the inception of the idea and its execution, the student wouldn’t lose faith in himself or the tutor/Writing Advisor.

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