"Pearls of Wisdom"

For the past month or so, we've worked on two occasions with the kids at the Boys & Girls Club on their digital story project under the theme "Pearls of Wisdom."

The little girl that myself and another one of my classmates has been working with (I'll call her Amy) appeared to be slightly disinterested during our first meeting together. She had not yet began the interview process, but was still in the very basic stages of formulating suitable questions in order to get the information she desired from her interviewee. At the end of that first session, we managed to get her moderately interested and more excited to begin the interview process.

Fast forward to two weeks later.

Amy, for some reason, seemed even more disinterested than she was when she had not even started her interviews. As she had brought none of her materials with her to the session, we tried to prompt her to brainstorm ideas for her script, first verbally, then in written format. However, she blatantly told us she no longer wanted to do the project, as it did not excite her very much and she felt pigeonholed into asking a few generic questions that had been set in place (or recommended, I don't know for sure) by the lady supervising the project.

Once again, we, with the aid of Professor Dolson, had to try and motivate her, which was even less successful that it was previously.

This made me realize that, as a writing consultant, I'm probably going to be faced with students who didn't come to the consultations of their own free will, but did so through the prompting of a professor (some of whom make writing center consultations mandatory for their students). It is always a challenge to motivate people to be excited about their own work, but is the destruction of the creative mind (something Amy felt she was suffering from) a huge killer of the writer's soul and drive?