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Fancy White Columns and Yellow Carbon Copy Slips
Cartiér Gwin
It was the week of finals, and I was walking with a friend when I noticed the huge tree
that sat offset to the right of the library.
―You know Amy, I feel like I see this tree naked more often than I see it with its leaves.‖
I did not know whether it was because I usually only worked the Thursday night shift in the
library during fall semesters or because it was simply more noticeable when exams slowed
everything and everybody down, causing casual conversation among students to turn into no
more than amusing afterthoughts.
―Yeah, me too. Since the leaves are shaped like hearts, I always feel really bad for
walking on them.‖
The tree was only appealing in stature. Its branches became thinner as my eyes followed them to
their tips. All of its bark appeared to be lighter without the shade of its heavy, lumping leaves
that were normally responsible for creating an impressive contrast between its dark, wide bottom
and its callow foliage. Thick, thin, barren.
Likewise, so had been John Stone Hall, the campus‘ writing center. This semester, tutors
were off location and tutoring wherever they thought freshmen might have lurked. The writing
center had been thinning from the inside out, and the computer lab could not hold a bathroom‘s
worth of heat. The next thing I knew, the small, white two-story house was undergoing
construction. The main temporary relocation spot was a vacant classroom in the Christian
Center. It was not furnished with old, wooden curled-toed pleated chairs. There were no dusty
reference books spiral-bound with black plastic coils and no coffee pots with slowly seeping
brew. I did not mind. I liked working for the writing center.
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It seemed like only months ago that I was sitting on the couch in Dr. Steven Smith‘s
office discussing whether or not one could tell if Egyptian physicians were ever subject to
penalty by Hammurabi‘s Code, but that was three years ago. The second semester of my
freshman year, Kathy Griffin told me that Dr. Smith had recommended me for a tutoring position
in the writing center, and I enrolled in the tutor training class early that semester. Before that, I
was living in Franklin, on the third floor, with a bunch of other freshmen girls who were also
taking Heritage. Professors assigned us a paper every weekend and regularly kept in touch with
us via email. I had never tutored anyone on a paper before coming to Millsaps. I could not tell
you what a writing center was. Somehow word spread that I was a pretty good writer, and I
started to get frequent visits at my dorm room. At the time I was sharing a room with Niki—a
girl with tucked arms and round cheeks, whose parents were from Nigeria—but she did not seem
to mind the extra company. Soon afterwards I was receiving feedback from my peers: ―Cartiér, I
made my first ‗A‘ in Dr. Zale‘s class!‖ ―Oh my goodness! You‘re out of water? I‘m going to buy
you a case of water!‖ ―You should come to Cozumel with me and my friends!‖ Tutoring in
Franklin had its rewards, but I was bound for a minimum wage ticket and an extra hour course
every semester thereafter in tutoring writing.
It would have been a simpler approach to write about the treasures of my liberal arts
education at Millsaps College by considering the diversity of courses and professors that I have
had, amazingly in the same department at times. However, it has become meaningful for me
personally to understand how my liberal arts education has also allowed for my discovery
process to take place more uniformly. I would guess that not many educators think about how the
overall function of a liberal arts education is transformed when a student writer commits to
engaging in an ongoing academic conversation about writing in the same class for four years.
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Yes, I have taken the Advanced Teaching Writing course six times along with some other very
talented and dedicated writing tutors. None of us has ever failed the course or desperately needed
the extra hours to gain an elective. We are simply required to take the course as long as we want
to tutor in the writing center; after all, each semester brings new challenges, and the course
provides the center‘s coordinators with an ongoing opportunity to train us for writing
consultations.
The Millsaps College website provides a list of liberal arts skills that students are liable to
develop during their education. I must say—with acknowledgement to the enrichment of my
critical thinking skills and all things equal—that my ―aesthetic judgment‖ and ―global and multicultural awareness‖ have been tailored the most. The college catalog traditionally describes
aesthetic judgment as ―the ability to understand and appreciate creative responses to the world,
and to develop one's own modes of creative expression‖ and global and multi-cultural awareness
as ―the ability to understand and appreciate a variety of social and cultural perspectives‖
(―Liberal‖ 45). During my time at Millsaps, my liberal arts education transcended the ingenuity
of interdisciplinary studies into meta-discourse that enhanced my academic and social
collaborations on all levels. Let me explain.
Kathy, my good friend and second roommate who is from Vietnam, specifically
encouraged me to put into practice (with her) any useful sounding linguistic or writing pedagogy
that might improve her writing and English speaking. During a session she would freely allow
me to destroy her paper and then ask her questions about her first language as it always
inevitably showed up, in some form, in her English writing. She would say to me what sounded
like ―Em co hieu khong, Cartiér?‖ and I would answer in English, ―No, I don‘t understand.‖
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However, the more I learned from theory and experience tutoring in the writing center, the more
easily I could help and relate to Kathy and other peers who needed my help.
Sarah, who lived next door and shared a bathroom with me junior year, was a transfer
student from Ireland. We were talking to each other while looking straight ahead in the same
wide mirror fluffing hair and turning waists when she confessed that she had no idea where the
writing center was or why people went there. Our first session together was about ―all of those
red squiggly lines,‖ as she described them, in her Microsoft Word document.
―Sarah, look at your spelling!‖ I laughed out.
―I know. In Ireland we spell ‗color,‘ c-o-l-o-u-r. We use z‘s instead of s‘s. I don‘t know
where to change the letters,‖ she laughed.
Sarah was a very talented writer; she wrote about different business affairs with great clarity and
detail. I was surprised to learn that Irish students write more than American students overall and
for any given paper assignment. She showed me some of her work and said that she was used to
writing at least 10 to 20 pages per assignment.
Michael, a fairly new friend of mine from China, stopped by the writing center for help.
He explained to me that he could not hear the mistakes in his paper and that he would have to
rely on me to point them out so that he could correct them from what he knew about English
grammar rules. I had never read such elegant metaphors before reading Michael‘s paper! It was a
great challenge to help him preserve his own voice without overshadowing it with English
grammar restrictions. I slowed down in reading a particular sentence in the paper, and he asked
me what was wrong with it.
―Nothing‘s wrong with it, Michael… It‘s just not…‖
―Not what?‖
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―Umm… not idiomatic.‖
―Well, I don‘t want idiomatic.‖
At that point I respected Michael‘s sophisticated approach and style of writing despite all of the
theory that I had been taught about introducing native language constructions into students‘
writing.
―You know, I don‘t want idiomatic either. The sentence makes sense in its context.‖
Once we got further into the paper, he had to explain to me how computer system information is
encoded through zeros and ones so that I could help him revise his paper for clarity. I noticed
that Michael used the word ―mission‖ in a way that I had never understood it to be used. Once I
offered some words as substitutes to see which one he would pick as the most closely related to
his intended meaning, he explained to me that what Americans often call a task or effort is a
mission in his country. Also, I noticed that he would make statements that I thought weakened
his thesis. He explained to me how it seemed necessary for him to remain humble, considering
that his audience was the head of a particular department. Just days ago, Dr. Bares was trying to
show me how to accomplish a similar voice in parts of my research paper and convince me that it
would strengthen my thesis! I learned more about technology, Chinese culture, and language
semantics during that one hour session than I had ever learned in any one hour lecture.
Nadia, a close friend of mine, comes into the center often to talk about writing and
discourse. Her family is from Albania, and she noticed cultural differences in the structure of
conversation. This happened after I decided to tell Nadia that my roommate, Erin, had accidently
locked me in the bathroom:
―Cartiér, have you noticed that you, and most Southerners I would say, hold
conversations by telling stories?‖
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―I guess you‘re right, Nadia. I didn‘t notice until you didn‘t respond with a story,‖ I said.
―Oh… you should hear my grandmother! She really gets straight to the point.‖
―My granddaddy always starts, ―I remember when I…‖
We both laugh.
Sabira, a student from the Middle East whose first language is not English, walked into
the writing center one afternoon while Ross and I were on shift. She was very polite and softspoken. I remember her having questions about scientific writing and APA referencing. After
talking with her about her assignment and providing her with some ready-to-go materials, I did
not think that we would end up eating dinner together in the cafeteria talking about how excited
we were about our next break. She asked me where I was from, and from there I ended up
describing a man in a white flaring suit with the best hair you could imagine.
―His name is Evelis?‖
―No, Elvis.‖
I was sitting on her left side, and I could hear her laughing hysterically even though her head
wrap blocked her face.
Ana de la Cruz proved to be more interested in advancing my bilingual abilities than she
was in receiving my help with her own writing. She let me borrow her Spanish-English Bible
and even invited me to her home for her little sister‘s birthday party. Her mother drilled me in
the ways of speaking informal Spanish; her favorite soap opera was the only appropriate way to
do so. Her little sister, round and agile, taught me how to blow big bubbles. Her friends showed
me how to eat real Peruvian soup, and her cousins danced in circles around me. It was not
perhaps, until Ana went back to Costa Rica, Sarah back to Ireland and Kathy off campus that I
realized that the people I encountered in the writing center and their ideas—creative, unrefined,
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nationalistic—were the most integral parts of the type of discourse that often took place in that
small white house; it was not the tutoring, the original assignments and the good reports that
were all somehow filtered through the same place.
The writing center, the Advanced Teaching Writing course and its various coordinators
all functioned to deregulate the standard liberal arts experience. Even though I studied similar
subjects of writing at the same table for years, my work in the writing center became flexible in
intention. My liberal arts education is one that lends itself to learning through collaboration,
interaction and mutual support outside of the center and outside of the classroom. It has already
influenced the work I do beyond Millsaps, beyond Jackson. My multicultural awareness has not
only come from certain texts to which I have been introduced in my classes, but rather the people
themselves, in close quarters. By helping peers from all departments and disciplines, I have
learned how to integrate theory, practice, and creativity on multiple levels. Through this sort of
continuous meta-discourse, Millsaps has tailored me to function behind the scenes and in the
forefront. I am able to communicate effectively and also explain how I managed to do so. I am
capable of deconstructing large ideas and telling someone how I came up with them. I can
analyze extraneous conclusions and hypothesize their origins. I was ―one‖ who came to Millsaps
and will leave as two: engineer and artist. I now have several lenses through which I can write,
especially in my creative writing. The work in which committed writing center tutors engage
helps to realize the higher standards in academics that set Millsaps apart from other universities.
Now John Stone Hall stands taller, with fancy white columns. In front of it, there are no
heart shaped leaves leading to its porch, no friendly tutors yet to cluster its inside, marking
yellow carbon copy slips for every new and old face. There are no winding branches behind the
center for your eyes to follow for that matter, but the house‘s white, horizontal siding is enough
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to keep anybody‘s eyes rolling from both of its edges until one sees the wooden door in the
middle: a wide entrance, a thin amount of hall space, a temporarily barren place. Tutors are
anticipating a much larger crowd once its new paint has dried.
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Works Cited
―Curriculum.‖ 2006–07 College Catalog. 2006. Millsaps College. 9 Dec. 2009.
< http://www.millsaps.edu/_resources/author_files/college_catalog_2006-2007.pdf >.