{"id":2770,"date":"2012-10-29T08:12:38","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T13:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=2770"},"modified":"2012-10-30T14:59:48","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T19:59:48","slug":"physician-heal-thyself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/physician-heal-thyself\/","title":{"rendered":"Physician, Heal Thyself!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Kevin<\/a><\/strong>
Kevin Mullen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Kevin Mullen.<\/strong> Kevin Mullen is a dissertator in Literary Studies, with a minor in Composition and Rhetoric, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.\u00a0 This is his third year working at the Writing Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

There is a particular kind of shame that forms when you come face-to-face with the fact that you are not practicing what you preach.\u00a0 It usually surfaces when you are alone, probably at night, thinking back on all you did and said during the day.\u00a0 Suddenly, it\u2019s there, looking back at you\u2014the fact that the very thing you encourage in others is not something you yourself do.<\/p>\n

The importance of collaboration in writing: it\u2019s one of those core beliefs that I feel evangelical about, that I imagine at the heart of what I do, and of who I am, as a teacher.\u00a0 When I was a fellow in Turkey and had 180 students a semester I still managed to meet with each one individually in order to work on their writing; I think I broke the record for conferences in the Intermediate Writing course here at UW-Madison (every other week, all semester long); I convinced a very skeptical board of directors, as well as a group of reluctant teachers, at a local college to require two conferences a semester for their composition course; and, this last August, I led a workshop for almost 70 TA\u2019s teaching writing-intensive courses all over campus that explored how, and why, to include conferences.
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So why, why<\/em> did it take me so long to actually come to the Writing Center as a student?\u00a0 Through all the years of course work, the dissertation proposal, conference proposals, fellowship applications, job applications, and now the dissertation, I have been wrestling alligators late into the night all by my lonesome\u2014and with middling results.\u00a0 So if I have known better this whole time, why have I not taken part in a process that I believe in when it comes to my own work?<\/p>\n

While I am sure that there are many anxieties at work here, the one that seems to be at the base of them all is a fear of visibility.\u00a0 One of the most fundamental (and, for some, painful) transitions that we work through in graduate school is making our own ideas more publically visible, even while we are in the midst of developing these ideas.\u00a0 We are here to practice, to stand in front of a group of people and read a paper even though we are still struggling to understand what a good paper sounds like.\u00a0 We are told that we are joining the academic community, yet it takes a long time to really believe that we belong.<\/p>\n

Or, at least, it took me<\/em> a long time.\u00a0 In those first couple years, I felt slightly like a fraud who had somehow snuck in through the back door and now could not let anyone discover how unqualified he was.\u00a0 So I toiled, silently in my apartment, and turned in papers that I couldn\u2019t bear to look at for months, hoping that I would just slip by unnoticed.\u00a0 Invisible.<\/p>\n

That feeling has long since faded, but the fact remained: for all my talk of collaboration, I had never brought my own work to the Writing Center and it was starting to bother me.\u00a0 So when the opportunity to write this post came up, it sounded like a great chance to both finally break the seal and explore how the process looks, and feels, from the other side.\u00a0 Plus, I had to write two single-spaced, single-page essays for a fellowship application.\u00a0 So I made two appointments\u2014one for 30 minutes, which just so happened to be with an instructor who has been a close friend of mine since I first moved to Madison (Theresa Nguyen), and one for 60 minutes, with a new instructor I had just met once a couple weeks before (Anna Floch).\u00a0 They were not selected purposefully; they were just the next two availabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Theresa<\/a>
Theresa Nguyen<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/td>\n
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\"Anna<\/a>
Anna Floch<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Here\u2019s what I learned:<\/p>\n