Why we've lowered the lighting:
by Christi Nogle
The Writing Center as an on-campus salon
Every semester, from midterm until final
exams, the Writing Center becomes an
exciting place. Clients line up on the couch,
waiting for a chance at a walk-in consultation;
students rush in looking for staplers, post-it notes,
handbooks and dictionaries; and the phone rings
incessantly. The consultants barely have time to say
hello to each other, so we sometimes interrupt
consultations in order to tell other consultants about
their phone messages or just to talk for a few
seconds. The clients don't seem to mind. They are
stressed to the limit, of course, but there is
something warm about them at this time. Maybe
they are thinking that they've nearly made it through
another semester. Maybe they are just glad to have a
place to sit and talk, not to forget about school but
to look at their education in a different way. We
bend rules for them too, staying after our shifts or
making extra time to work with those clients who
really need to see us.
But every semester, from the first day of work
until midterm, the Writing Center is a quieter place.
We have a few clients, students who are very
fastidious or who have been assigned early papers,
students who are insecure about their writing or who
have been sent to us by their instructors. We also
have to read and write comments on WACRATS
drafts, visit the freshman classes, and finalize our
work schedules. It can be a busy time, but it isn't the
same as the latter half of the semester. The clients
often seem more nervous during this period.
Consultations tend to be formal, and there is not the
same background buzz of students talking.
One of the reasons for this difference is the
often-cited fact that Boise State is a
commuter campus, with a large number of
nontraditional students, students of all ages who
work full time, and students with children. Being
commuters, employees, and parents, the students are
very busy. They do not feel they have time to visit
places like the Writing Center unless it's an
emergency, and they don't have as many school-related emergencies in the first half of the semester
as they have in the second half.
The unfortunate thing about the commuter
campus, which is also often cited, is that students
miss out on much of what college is supposed to be
about. They tend not to attend on-campus events,
participate in student government, or spend time
with classmates and professors. The number of
upper-division students who do not know where the
Writing Center is always amazes me, but after a
short conversation, I will discover that they are also
unfamiliar with the Career Center and do not know
how to find the cafeteria. They seem to be saying
that there is no space in their lives for anything,
unless it is an emergency or a graduation
requirement.
Sometimes I think that college is all about
bureaucracy--getting the forms signed, paying the
fees, showing up for tests. Just as it goes in the
financial aid office or the student ID office, so it
goes in the Writing Center. Early in the semester,
especially, most clients come in to check off another
item from their to-do lists, they want the session over
as soon as possible, and they seem to forget it as
soon as it's done. So it goes in their classes,
presumably, and I am no better. I check my
astronomy class's website religiously, waiting to see
if I've accumulated enough points to pass, at which
point I will stop going to class.
This bureaucratic flavor is a side effect of the
liberal arts college experience. Students have to
fulfill requirements that hold no particular interest
for them, such as core classes and trips to the
Writing Center. Since they have no particular
interest in these requirements, they treat them in a
mechanical way, checking off boxes and filling out
forms.
In the Writing Center, we have tried to avoid this
problem by suggesting that instructors do not include
a writing consultation in the course requirements.
We still encourage instructors to offer incentives
such as extra credit for a Writing Center visit, and to
use the center as an optional or make-up activity
(e.g., when a student has missed an in-class
workshop), but our director has decided that the
business we get from required visits is simply not
worth the drawbacks of those visits.
Last semester and before, required visits were
always on our minds. Students who were required to
visit the Writing Center would fidget and appear not
to be listening to the consultants' comments.
Sometimes they would become rude, argumentative,
or just plain mad. They would express anger at
having to use time outside class--"free time"--for a
class requirement. They would tell us that they knew
more about writing than we ever would, or that they
already knew what was wrong with their papers, or
that they were sure they were going to pass and so
just didn't care. More often, they would try to be
polite but would clearly have no intention of revising
their papers. I had a few clients appear for their
appointments an hour before class, with clean final
copies of their papers ("Don't write on it, please. I'm
turning it in today"). And these were the times when
the clients actually appeared for their appointments;
other times, they would forget to come, forget to
cancel, and leave us waiting.
I wonder how much of the students' hostility and
apathy was directed toward the Writing Center and
how much was directed toward the classes
themselves. As an English major, I was happy to
take the beginning composition and core humanities
classes that would improve my writing. I thought the
Area Three classes were a waste of my time, since I
could not envision a job where I would fill out
bubble sheets or dissect frogs. It is possible that
students whose majors are outside the humanities see
writing in the same way that I see multiple choice
testing: a useless skill. I could argue with them.
"Writing will help you think; it provides a valuable
key to learning and organization," I could say, and I
have, on occasion, said something similar. The
resentment remains. The students give reasons for
it: writing wastes time that they could be spending
on their real interests; or they aren't good at writing,
so they would prefer to work on areas in which they
have more talent. I have had the same thoughts
about my Area Three classes.
This is the kind of resentment that causes
students to make sharp distinctions between "class
time" and "free time." "Life" and "school" are also
distinct, as are major-related and non-major classes.
Perhaps it is the Boise State slogan, "Real Education
for the Real World," that makes students focus so
intently on job preparation.
In "New Semester, Same Old Schtick," an
opinion piece for The Arbiter, Brandon Fiala states
the point in a particularly bold way:
Time. Success in college takes nothing more
than the surplus of time at one's disposal. Not
many people have the time, especially here at
BSU, to care about school any more than
exerting minimal effort for maximal grade. We
are here to jump through hoops to get the honor
of a job, where we will actually learn what to do
[. . . .] The best advice is: play the game, and
play it well. Wink a little, wear a wry smile,
maybe cheat, but don't forget to graduate.
As Fiala's article shows, education is not a cure
for this unease. Some of the loftiest disciplines of
all, like Philosophy, History, Art, and Art History,
give students reason to question the structure of the
university, its "politics," and its bureaucratic
element. Adding theoretical knowledge and language
(such as Marxism) to an already-entrenched blue-collar reaction against the university creates a
powerful force, a powerful obstacle to the kind of
wide-eyed wonder that the liberal arts system seems
to demand.
Yet I know, from my own history as well as
from the stories of so many coworkers and
classmates, that college means more to
people than a way to get a better-paying job or to
rise to a higher class. Many of us want to be
idealistic, I think.
A recent event showed me how true this is. I had
been working hard to complete a series of paintings
for the Senior Thesis Exhibition. I had to put off
other projects and miss sleep so I could paint, and I
kept thinking that I was wasting time. After all, I'm
probably not going to make a career out of painting.
I will always be carving out time between work and
other activities to paint, and it occurred to me that it
would be much, much easier to not paint at all.
When the opening night came, I was glad to have
spent the time I did on my paintings because people
were examining them, but I still questioned whether
the whole pursuit had been worthwhile. Then my
mother, who had attended the opening, gave me a
call. She was getting ready for her graveyard shift at
WalMart, and she kept talking about how much fun
the opening had been. She had seen me talking to
friends about art and was a little excited about how
many artists and art enthusiasts she had met. She
was looking at the event a little too romantically for
my taste, and I started to tell her that, no, all the
people were not artists. They were people who work
at grocery stores and coffee shops. They were
regular people, like her, like me. They were just
pretending.
I stopped myself. Were they just pretending?
When I have a consultation with another
student, are the two of us just pretending? I thought
so at first, when I would constantly hear other
people's advice coming out of my mouth. I would
say what some professor said, and the client would
say what she thought a good student should say, and
we would offer one another a wry smile.
I might still be mimicking others. I can't tell
anymore, because I believe what I say. "A good
thesis sums up the paper, attracts the reader's
interest, and offers some internal tension that will be
resolved in the conclusion," I say to the
Developmental Writing student, without a trace of
cynicism. This matter is an emergency for him, so he
listens. We debate for a while over what kind of
sentence might or might not fit those requirements,
and when he leaves I keep discussing the matter with
the other consultants.
As I'm talking about theses, I realize the
strangeness of the situation. I don't talk about what
makes a good thesis, at least not during my free
time. In the Writing Center, I feel as if the rift
between who I am as a student and who I am as a
person has narrowed. Maybe it is this place that
confuses me, shifting as it is between being school
and being not-school. It is in the Liberal Arts
Building, to be sure, and it has the same ugly walls
as the rest of the building, but there is a couch and a
coffee table, a soft chair. The director has turned off
the flourescent lights in favor of lamps for a homier
atmosphere, and people act as if they are at home,
sitting on the floor or draping themselves on the
furniture.
Now it is late in the semester, and the room is
buzzing again with the sound of students
talking about their papers. In talking about
their papers, they are also talking about all the ideas
in their papers and the ideas that have yet to be
written. The topics are deep: politics, art, history,
religion, literature, science. I think back to literature
professors who mentioned the old writers and their
salons. The whole idea seems embarrassingly old-fashioned: women in hats, modernist art, lots of
smoking. They must have been so much more sincere
than we are, I think, but the essence of the salon is
here. We are talking about ideas, not as competitors
for a grade but simply as people interested in ideas.
I wish more students would join the conversation
in the Writing Center, but not too many more. The
room can hold only a few. A better wish is that they
would come all semester long, that they would
always be as receptive and as engaged with ideas as
they are right now. My wish is not likely to come
true. There are too many reasons why they can't
come all semester, just as there are too many reasons
why I can't sustain my own enthusiasm for more
than a few weeks. The important point is that they
are here now. At least now, for a short time, they
are willing to pretend they are great students, great
thinkers, and in doing so, they might just make it
true.
I have loved working in the Writing Center for
the past three years. Just as our director predicted, I
have learned about writing from the clients and the
other consultants. I am grateful for the opportunities
I have had to meet people, to help them, and to let
them help me. I am grateful for the chance I've had
to pretend that school matters.The exclusionary role of education can easily be
understood by asking just one question: what
does it take to succeed in college? Hard work?
No. Intelligence? No. A love of learning? Not
hardly.
This article, which appeared soon after the start
of fall classes, stayed with me. I am tempted to
swallow every word of it. I, like many Boise State
students, come from a culture in which education is
not particularly valued. None of my high school
friends went to college; neither did my parents.
Going to college is a little bit embarrassing. If I
were studying to secure a lucrative job, it might be
different, but since I am studying in the lofty
disciplines of Art and English, I have a hard time
justifying my pursuits to family and friends. I
sometimes have difficulty justifying these pursuits to
myself.