Hey everyone – if you’re just checking in, I’ve decided this week to post a blog a day in the spirit of capturing day-to-day life at Puget Sound. Check out my daily posts here – there will be one a day until at least next Sunday. Enjoy!
I have a two-hour stretch of free time in an otherwise packed day, so I thought I’d take a moment to share what I was up to for my second official day of daily blogging.
I work at the Center for Writing, Learning & Teaching as a writing advisor, and I spent the first part of my day helping out with a paper editing session for one of the freshman writing seminar classes on Medieval literature. A lot of the time was spent discussing ideas, which is one of my favorite parts about being a writing advisor. Not only do I get to see students make connections they hadn’t thought of via discussion, but usually I see some new connections I never would have thought of, too. The Writing Center, my interactions with professors, and my discussion classes have shown me how powerful discussion is as a vehicle for planning effective writing.
After that I had three classes: Math of Computer Science, 17th Century British Literature, and Programming Language Paradigms. Ironically, there was actually a fair amount of overlap between math and 17th Century literature. We’re studying formal languages in math – how to construct grammars and alphabets and words and vocabularies mathematically, so it’s come to vaguely resemble an English class. See – there can be some overlap between math and Milton (at least I’d like to think there is).
Now I’ve got a brief stretch of free time before I go work at the Writing Center again – this time on advising students during our hour-long appointments. I’m also meeting with another writing advisor later tonight to put the finishing touches on a proposal we’re submitting to the National Conference on Peer Tutoring and Writing, a conference addressing approaches to and theory regarding peer tutoring and writing advising. The proposal’s due Wednesday, so we’ll probably spend a while on it.
Later tonight, baritone Sherrill Milnes is leading a masterclass I’m going to try to go see, and I hope to work some piano practicing of my own in in the mean time. Lastly, I’m also working on a scholarship application due Thursday – more details on that to come, but it involves designing an iPhone app in a week. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, but there’s so much left to do before Thursday!
That’s all for now – stop by again tomorrow for my next post and some more updates!