The day had finally come. The day I had to have a one-on-one conference with my least favorite student, aka the problem student. My problem student, the one who rolls his eyes, scoffs at me, and repeatedly whispers to people about how terrible my class is, stepped into my office looking surprisingly normal. He FINALLY looked nervous and didn’t have that arrogant aura around him that I always imagined to be gray, the color I associate with conceitedness.

Until that point, I was preparing myself for him to enter my office by thinking of two different ways the conference could go. One, I would immediately address his behavioral issues and threaten to mark him absent if I saw the poor attitude repeated throughout the rest of the quarter. Or two, I could completely ignore his past behavior and focus on encouraging his writing and get him excited to strive for an A in the class.

After looking at his nervous face, I caved and went with option two.

We sat down, and went through all the basics of where he is in the class, how the rest of his quarter is going, etc. Everything was relatively simple, and he actually paid attention to me and opened up about how he was a calculus major and didn’t like English that much. It was then I decided to compliment his writing and say how glad I was that he was producing such good work in the class. Immediately, his face changed to shock and he told me that he thought he was a terrible writer, especially compared to others in the class.

I learned after that, that this individual struggles heavily with writer’s block and felt like he produced poor work because he wasn’t able to formulate good ideas in a timely manner.

“Martha uses another rule, one that is not only problematic in itself, but one that often clashes directly with the elaborate plan and obsessive rule above. She believes that humanities papers much scintillate with insight, must present an array of images, ideas, ironies gleaned from literature under examination” (395).

Whenever I presented a free-write prompt to the class and he scoffed at it, it came from a place of insecurity rather than disdain for the class. If I was able to peer into his head and see what he thought of writing from the beginning, I wouldn’t have come up with assumptions so immediately.