I Feel Like a Failure

I feel like a failure. I’m looking at my computer screen, trying to convey something to my student and I just know that it’s not going to make an impact. I went through seven conferences today, where I got together with my students and we talked about their papers thus far, and I think that it went pretty well. By and large the students had good ideas and they were open to my recommendations about where they should go next.


But there are a couple of students that I don’t know what to do with. English is not their first language, and that is okay. People come from different places and they speak other languages and sometimes they learn English and sometimes they decide to come to the United States to learn it and that’s all fine and dandy. (OK… hopefully now I can proceed without sounding like a complete bigot, though maybe not.)

I have a couple of students who have not been required to write in the past. Not that they haven’t had to write but they haven’t had to write papers. Writing for them is that thing that you do on forms and when answering short answers on tests. They don’t seem to have any sense of how to structure a paper at all. And I don’t know how to teach them. I feel like I have the skills to take a student from high school writing to some semblance of college writing, but I don’t know how to do it when I’m starting pretty much from nothing.

I don’t know what to do.

And it doesn't help that I'm sick.