Today was fast-paced and rather difficult, but worthwhile. Found out that one of the professors I work with seems to have pretty unrealistic standards for her ESL students' grammatical skills. No wonder the ESL students have been grumbling for some weeks now about her; I thought it was just because said instructor isn't clear on assignment directions (that's what I can mainly tell from lab stuff, and of course I have my own personal experience) - but today I saw, for the first time, a graded product. Red pen over every visible error--of which there were many, but of quite varying degrees of seriousness--and comments that weren't meant to be tactless but sometimes read that way. A barely-passing grade at the bottom. An attempt at consolation (after three negative adjectives describing her sentences, something like "but you are IMPROVING"). And all this to a student who's only been writing in English (maybe even speaking English - I don't remember now) for two years and spends more hours in the lab than any other student I can think of. And this isn't even the instructor whose class was designed so poorly (and so far below college-level) that I actually reported it to her dean - this was someone else.
Yikes.
Writing centers usually don't comment on instructors' policies, especially negatively, to students. But after some thought, I deliberately broke that rule. I explained to the student the difference between the standard she was meeting in class and the standard she would actually be held to during portfolio assessment. And I told her that the standard in class was higher than I would set, and that for the amount of time that she had spent working with English, she should be proud of the work she had done.
I did also tell her what the instructor was right about. The student does have a lot of errors that impede meaning, and we did talk about that.
I left her doing an extra-credit assignment that will raise her grade on the red-penned one...if she gets at least a C. When she left the lab today, I didn't feel as though, according to her instructor's usual standard, her odds were very good.
She's going to come back tomorrow. God, please help her - we can't just edit. But at this point, that's about what she'd need.
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One thing I prayed for, I did receive - and it was a big victory. I had a very productive conversation with a new advisee, who had been flirting with educational choices, for the fall semester, that I considered unwise. By the time she got to me, most of the hard work inside her had been done already - by God, I think, through His use of several things, including her sometimes-difficult creative-writing class. The whole thing, start to finish - talking about aspirations and such, talking about classes, choosing classes, et cetera - took about ninety minutes, but it didn't feel like it. I left the meeting hungry and tired - but excited and grateful. I walked over to another building and (after a bathroom break) bought a hamburger, squeezed on ketchup/a little mustard/a dab of mayo, and spread the condiments together with a plastic knife. I ate it with, of all things, cinnamon-sugar Pringles (brought from home - I think I'd bought them at Job Lot) - a late lunch after a pretty busy day.