Blog Post #10 (Ian)

Show me a paper with integers and I will show you the fear and cluelessness that comes with having taken my final math class at age 17. While most of my friends spent their senior year of high school toiling through calculus, I opted to drop the subject altogether to read Pinocchio in Italian. I then matriculated to a liberal arts college that had zero gen ed requirements (proudly touted by admins as the "Open Curriculum" but widely understood by students as a way to escape having a curriculum at all) during which the closest I came to taking anything remotely quantitative was my slightly misguided and extremely anxiety-inducing foray into the world of Economics.

Needless to say I now feel somewhat out of my depth whenever I work with students who regard statistical analysis as anything but utter torture, as is the case with one of my Enrollment students this semester, Siyuan. On exchange from Tsinghua University in China this year, Siyuan is interested in quantifying the extent to which anti-corruption efforts in China have actually impaired economic growth rather than streamlined over-the-table commerce. Working with Siyuan has greatly improved my vocabulary. I am not sure Siyuan would say the same about me. While I may be a fluent speaker of English, Siyuan is far more fluent in the language of "regressions," "proprietary costs," and "voluntary customer information disclosure agreements." So long as we are working on the sentence level - talking about things like syntax, subject-verb agreement, or word choice - we are fine. The second we get into questions of structure, however, and the best way of breaking down an idea or argument into manageable chunks, Siyuan must first deliver a refresher lecture on her terms and methodology (in her second language no less) which has no guarantee of actually educating me but  is sure to make both of us very tired. At the same time, I will say that it is in precisely these kind of arrangements where I feel the idealized "Peer-to-Peer" philosophy of  writing center work is most apparent, since our working together requires constant back-and-forth teaching to accomplish anything at all.

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 8, 2019 at 9:53 PM

    I have had a similar experience with my marketing students, especially the one student with what I would call a more math focused research project. Similar to Ian, I have found it to be both enriching and challenging to communicate with my students about subjects I know little about. The constant back and forth challenges me as a tutor because I have to learn details about a new subject. It also challenges my students because they have to explain their project in their own words, out loud. These interactions, however, have been rewarding and fun for all of us.

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