Friday Afternoons and Sunday Mornings

I met with my seniors this past weekend. Friday I had my meeting with JV and we partially filled out his CSU application (I told him that he received $110 from a community fund so that he can now pay for his college apps, the thrill wasn't visible but I'm sure he is thankful for it). Hopefully he can attend the workshops for the UC/CSU applications because I turned out having questions on how to fill out some of it. I think the most productive part of the meeting Friday was looking over possible majors JV would be interested in doing. I'm really excited for him because he has a lot of doors open to him and he can take pretty much any path he wants as long as he puts his mind to it. For me, now that I have decided to do Development Studies I am really excited about it. Next semester I will be taking three major classes, but I really want to try to get into this Anthro class on ethnography and globalization so I can declare. And so to think about how excited I was coming into Cal in a similar situation which let me have the chance to explore and do whatever I wanted gets me excited about helping JV get into a position where he can almost have the world at his feet, ready for him to take whatever he wants and make the most out of it.

Today, I met with Hong, and to be honest I was a little frustrated. Hong is a Chinese immigrant and was in ELL for his first two years of high school and then transitioned into the regular program of classes with the rest of the school. I'm really proud of him for having been able to switch and do relatively well, but his English is still not that great and I only mention that because in reading over his personal statement, I just think "This is going to be a lot of work." For me, I know that I already have trouble getting English-as-a-first-language speakers to write well and effectively, and so helping Hong get his bearing with this statement is a bit of a challenge for me. I don't mind the grammatical errors or structural mistakes, but I'm having a hard time getting him to think the way he should be in writing his personal statement. For the open-ended for instance, his theme is about being an immigrant and having to transition to life in America. His ideas are very simplistic and having read the third draft, he is still not thinking and writing the way I have asked him to (like expanding on his ideas, being clearer about what he means, and being able to explain to me what his intent is). His academic preparation I basically skimmed and told him to rewrite it. His contribution to the university statement was actually okay and I edited it a bit to convey his ideas better, but I think he wants to rewrite it or choose another topic altogether. My main issue with how to approach editing his statement overall is that I really don't want to go about (re)writing it for him. I realized during my edit of his personal contribution that I was doing what I didn't want which was almost basically writing his statment for him. It took me almost no effort to say what he said 10 times better, but I really felt hesitant about that because I believe that he needs to be figuring out how to do so on his own. At the same time, he obviously has language barriers and the deadline is about two weeks away. He doesn't really have the time to improve his writing that much. He kept saying to me "Help me write," and I am trying to help him but in wanting to let Hong make his statment a true representation of himself I am having a difficult time in realizing how much to step up or step down in doing so.