Reflection

Dear Prof. Gleason,
I believe that my experiences this semester in the Writing Center Theory & Practice are a reflection of the work I have done in the Language & Literacy program last year and the work I did both professionally and personally this summer.
The work that we did in the program over the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 semesters gave me a foundation for understanding writing center theory and an ability to appreciate the historical basis for the research work that we did.
Our class with Prof. Gibbons at the library, meeting Michelle Keating-Dicaro, my classmates’ presentations on their scholarship, the chance to watch the incoming freshmen to the L&L program find their way with their assignments and their voices in class made this a memorable semester.
The experience that I feel will define it for me is my tutoring session at the CCNY Writing Center. This assignment gave me the chance to personally experience the practical application of the theories of Bruffee and North and to finally understand what the word praxis meant.
In your comments on my report of that assignment, you wrote that you saw improvement my writing. I spent a large part of my free time this summer free-writing, reading a recommended text on style and taking grammar quizzes on line. The extra-curricula grammar workshop you ran was also very helpful to me. That comment meant quite a lot to me because I saw it as the grade I got for the work I did on my writing this summer.
In terms of my own development, this semester was like on-the-job training. I worked at the Writing Center at BMCC while taking this class and taught a critical reading and writing class for the SEEK program while I was taking another class in the L&L program, Eng 5000, Introduction to the Teaching of Writing and Literature. I was very busy.
I would like to thank you for making yourself available to me all of the times that you took my phone calls and met with me in your office, and also for the trust you placed in me to work with my freshman classmates on our joint projects.
I look forward to the coming semester in the Language & Literacy Program.
Sincerely
Charlene Cambridge