"When is the last time you took a risk during a session with a writer? Writers, after all, risk a lot coming to us. What are we risking in return? When is the last time you could characterize a sessino as really, really fun?" --Elizabeth Bouquet, Noise from the Writing Center

I was re-reading Noise last night on the train and came across the above quotation. It is easy to fall into a rut, I guess. Some one is writing that about their training program on WCENTER. I liked Bouquet's book because it was risky in its approach and in its ideas. It challenges, I think, the idea of practice vs. risk taking. In many ways, I see it as an analogy to writing itself. Writing can be stagnant and commonplace, but the interesting stuff takes risks, doesn't it? Bouquet calls prescribed tutoring (and tutoring training for that matter) as low risk/low gain. It is "safe" I guess. High risk/high gain seems better to mean, but I wonder if high risk is not also inevitably paired with high loss. My mind races to a drag race--you may go fast, but if you lose control you crash and burn. Does that apply to high risk tutoring too? I think it may, but is what is gained better? I'm not sure that it is really a loss, since the nature of writing and teaching and teaching writing is about learning from losses and improving.

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