threat of violence closes YVCC again (but only in late April?)

Deb just emailed me to let me know what campus security closed down YVCC today due to a threat of violence. The same thing happened last year. I checked a post I wrote about it last year, and it was almost exactly a year ago. What’s this? Someone gets spring fever and the [...]

here’s the job I left

Here’s the job I left.  The opening just closed yesterday (and wasn’t open very long, I don’t think). I think they’re trying to get the position filled by the beginning of the winter quarter. I’ll be curious to hear who applied and, of course, who gets it!

Education INSTRUCTION AND CLASSROOM SUPPORT TECH 2 Yakima Valley [...]

Six tips to help students gain expertise

Hello from my alma mater writing center (at YVCC). I just found a copy of Nancy Sommers et al’s pamphlet Making the Most of College Writing: A Guide for Freshmen. Nice. I especially like this section, since so often students can’t imagine how they can become scholars themselves or how they can write with real [...]

a nice surprise!

Nice surprise today! I was browsing in the bookstore when a guy said, “Excuse me. Don’t I know you?” As soon as I saw his face, I remembered him from the YVCC Writing Center. “Yes! YVCC!” I said. “The Writing Center!” he replied. I couldn’t remember his name, but after we’d talked for a minute, [...]

my alma mater writing center

Found out yesterday that the YVCC writing center had made the local paper last Monday: $3 million grant will help YVCC expand Hispanic enrollment. Yay!
(That’s my former counterpart, Brad Smith, in the photo.)

ANDY SAWYER/Yakima Herald-Republic
Brad Smith of the Yakima Valley Community College writing center works with student Judith Johnson earlier this month. The college recently [...]

always beginning the world

Well, I just got back from delivering a few things to the YVCC campus: the two Writing Center thumbdrives that I’d accidentally come home with in my pants pocket last week… and my resignation letter. I dropped the thumbdrives and copy of the letter off in Dodie’s office (thanks to Kelley Chase [...]

“Plot against the loud happy writing people.”

I’m cleaning out my email files here at the YVCC Writing Center, since this is virtually my last day here. Weird feeling, that. But, anyway, I remember this magnetic poetry sentence which appeared on our white board one day (students were free to play with the words whenever they wanted to), and I [...]

Computer Use still most common reason students come to YVCC Writing Center

I’ll be curious, in my newest incarnation as a GTA at OSU’s CWL (wow, is that alphabet soup or what), to see the difference between a Writing Center that’s very much also a computer lab (as ours is here at YVCC) and one that’s not, one that concentrates almost solely on consultations.
Did a quick Tutortrac [...]

incoherent subordination?????

This summer I’ve been working with a Gen 1.5 student whose struggles with English are different from most of the other Gen 1.5ers I’ve worked with. I myself am struggling with how to describe her struggles.
It’s not so much that she uses faulty predication as incoherent predication or may be incoherent subordination.??
Almost every time [...]

Director, Hogwarts Writing Center

I got to do some fun stuff in my six-plus years in the YVCC Writing Center. I came up with this letter from Minerva McGonagall to our director, Dodie Forrest, back in November 2005. A group of us from the center were planning on seeing Goblet of Fire the day it came out and we [...]