Mercy Reading and Writing Center

Introduction:

This has been one of the most challenging yet utterly rewarding years I have ever had. Imagining and then creating the Mercy Reading and Writing Center has been a wonderful experience overall, and I am very proud of what we’ve done so far, and am even more excited to how we can build upon the base we’ve established.

Reflections:

When I say I have my dream job, I mean it. I have never been this excited to go to work every day, nor this personally and professionally fulfilled by my work. I am passionate about teaching reading and writing, passionate about our students in general, passionate about the benefits on conferencing with students individually, and passionate about LALAC (Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum). I feel like all of my schooling is finally worth something, and I know how lucky I am to be in this position, lucky to be able to use the best of my talents and education in an innovative environment.

I’ve been re-reading my professional blog entries from the past year, and am including the text of the first one (May 2006)

" Today is the first day of the rest of your life." I remember writing that on the white board on my first day of teaching, ever, and oddly enough, a number of students (they were high school freshmen then, now they are college sophomores and juniors) still remember it. Even though it is a trite saying, it still makes me happy that they know it, and maybe even sometimes think about it.

I like beginnings because they are so exhilarating. That probably also explains why I am always trying something new (this spring, SCUBA, this summer, running a half marathon) and also why I am addicted to travel (Slovenia or Turkey, Slovenia or Turkey): days open up, wide with the unknown, fraught with things that will work or not work, busses that will come or not come, and you move through it all, studying the chaos that will become a part of the stories you tell.

So, we begin this reading and writing center, this website, and we try to piece this together ex nihilo, out of nothing. Call it a blank slate, a room waiting for redesign, a template without content. Call upon friends, the guidebooks, the bits and pieces of experience that are threaded together like so much lint from the screen of the clothes dryer. Call yourself to make sure you are still there.

And then head out the door, because this is the first day of the rest of your life.

It has been nearly a year since I wrote that, and I am still feeling that sense of newness and exhilaration. While in many ways creating the MRWC was creating something new on a blank slate, it wasn’t an entirely blanks slate, and so one of the things that I know now that I didn’t know then is that so much of program building is public relations and, to a lesser extent, politics. Since I had been working at Mercy in a staff/administrative capacity, and since the room that houses the MRWC has been known as something else for as long as anyone can remember, I had a lot of things to break down and disassemble, while simultaneously tying to build up and assemble. Some people knew I had a background in teaching and was working as staff while finishing my MA degree, but many did not (including students), so from the beginning of the year I was faced with the challenge of not only building credibility for the MRWC but for myself as well. One of the best pieces of advice I received at the IWCA Summer Institute, and have since read it in several books on starting writing centers, is that faculty will generally fall into three groups: one group who will be on your team from the outset, one group who are in the middle and could be persuaded, and one group who no matter what you do you won’t ever reach. The advice was to focus on the first two groups and not worry about the third, and that single piece of advice has been most helpful. So, by initially working with the departments who were so excited they scheduled me into their classes for August in May (Social Studies and Religion), word quickly spread and as of March, I do feel like I have the support of almost everyone in the first two groups, and the number of people in the third group are very small.

The two things we at the MRWC are most proud of are the number of individual conferences we have had with students and the number of in-class workshops we have been invited to give. I was a bit concerned with how the block schedule might potentially limit the number of students who would have time to see us, and while I do think it is restrictive, between the lunch, collaboration and after school times, the online conferences, and the in-class sessions, we have been able to work with every Mercy student several times over (and some even more than that). The senior workshops for their application essays were really fun, and I predict that they will continue to grow in popularity. One students has received two handwritten notes from admissions officers at schools she’s been accepted to, each of them indicating how much they enjoyed reading her personal statement. Overall, I think the students are benefiting from the individualized support and I hope that it is translating into improved reading and writing in each of their classes. From the feedback we are getting from teachers, it appears to be.

Something else which we have found really productive is meeting with the parents in various situations. The parent night we offered on reading was successful, and the meetings we have had with individual parents have been very positive as well. In addition, working with the parents on the homework committee reinforced the need for us to help “teach” the parents as well as the students. We have also enjoyed working with faculty one-one-one, whether that has been researching new curriculum (i.e. texts) they could use in their classes or disseminating new activities whenever we have come across them. To this end, staying current in the field through reading journals is enormously useful. Every week we get an email from NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) which has annotated links to the articles of the week, as well as to classroom activities of the week. We are also on several email list-servs in which teachers of reading and writing share advice and strategies, and since teaching is really about sharing, not about reinventing the wheel, it is very helpful to get ideas from people all over the country, and then share them with my colleagues here.