(with apologies to Robert Fulghum)
Lesson #1. Writers need to be active participants in their own
learning
My writing center work has taught me that
Stephen North didn’t get the quote quite right when he said, “our job is to
produce better writers, not better writing.”
The grammatical problem with this sentence is that the subject doing the
“producing” is still the tutor and/or the writing center. For a tutoring session to work and learning
to happen, both tutor and writer have to be involved. In order to improve, a
writer has to write and think and write some more. A tutor can be involved in this process, but
they cannot be the sole actor in it. We
all have had sessions like this—where the student pushes the paper across the
table at us or demands, “Tell me what to write,” and the fundamental problem
with those moments is that if one gives in, nothing changes.
