I have the rare and wonderful privilege of having one of the best jobs on campus–I’m a peer writing tutor at McDaniel’s writing center. Most of the work I do as a writing tutor involves working one-on-one with students who sign up to use our services–we help students brainstorm, research, and revise their written work in all disciplines.
Our friend the cardboard robot went out in a blaze of glory!
Tutoring is fun and rewarding, but there’s other aspects of my writing tutor job that are fun as well. On Sunday, my boss Josh, the writing center director, had all of the writing tutors over to his house for what I guess can be best described as a working dinner. Josh ordered lots of pizza for everyone and while we pigged out, we discussed what’s going well in the writing center and what we can improve upon. Apparently, the in-dorm tutoring that we host in first year student dorms (Whiteford and Rouzer) once a week have become quite popular–overwhelmingly popular, in fact. We discussed ways we can tweak our system to accommodate the unexpected increase in demand for our residence hall tutoring, but I’m really happy to hear that first year students are taking advantage of this.
Our discussions were fun and useful, but there was also non-work related fun to be had. Josh and his wife had a baby over the summer, whom I’d gotten to meet back in August, and now that he’s three-and-a-half months old, he’s at that age when just about anything can make him smile. He’s a genuinely good baby and his parents are super lucky to have such a cool, easy-going kid. And once official business had been completely taken care of, we had other important business to tackle: we needed to burn the giant cardboard robot that we had made as a tutoring staff last semester. As much as we loved the robot, he was starting to fall apart and he had been taking up a lot of space, so in the end, burning him was much more fun and entertaining than it was sad. Fortunately, I have plenty of good pictures to remember him (and his death) by.
As a tutoring staff, we had always had work meetings and we had always had parties before, but this was the first time we had combined the two into one. I’d say it was a complete success. Because we had a business agenda, it was one of the most well-attended tutor parties I had ever been to, and it because it was at a party, it was probably the most fun work meetings I had attended–though when you get a bunch of McDaniel writing tutors together, anything can be fun!
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