There’s an irony in the fact that on its brochure he Writing and Reading Center emphasizes “self-paced.“
It’s hard to imagine the purpose of the writing center to be anything other than a waste of students and
faculty’s time.
Riverside City College’s WRC is designed to help students in English classes to work toward success at their own pace.
Anyone standing in the extensive line to get into the vacant WRC would argue that the WRC is far from
“self-paced.”
The WRC is inaccessible.
A new appointment-based system was implemented to hopefully alleviate the long lines and impossible wait times, but while improvements are obvious, they’re slight and only begin to touch on the real issue.
You can make an appointment online for one hour per week, but then you wait in line 10-20 minutes for
your appointment.
If you miss an appointment you could also try to wing it in a daring hope that you may get into one of the 11 wild card slots available every hour, but you have to carefully weigh your odds of waiting in line for hours to get in.
Theoretically, the system would function if only students would use it correctly.
But the legitimacy of that claim is debatable.
If a pretense is required to say that something functions, can you really say that it functions?
If the system they’re now implementing worked, it would be working and students would be getting into the WRC logging their mandatory hours and making their class grades.
There would not be lines daily between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. around the corner of the building for students struggling to meet their quota.
Not only does the WRC struggle in regular class weeks, but hours of the lab will reduce during finals week, and only students enrolled in eight-week classes will have access to the lab at its peak demand for midterms and finals.
While the goal of the WRC is to help students, and not “to exist just to exist,” the application is impeding more than helpful.
Currently the WRC poses more of a hindrance to students than an opportunity.
It is ill equipped to meet the student demand, and attempts to make it better have improved the
situation, but not yet solved the problem.
This semester the WRC requirement for hours was dropped from 16 to 12.54 due to problems they had with changes and technical issues.
Allegedly the system is much improved from the old system where people would binge on hours and take up tables, forcing students outside to wait for hours as the lines wrapped around the building, but the improvements are slight at best.
While English classes all require a specific amount of logged hours, and nearly all students need English, the campus is inadequately equipped to support the demands it makes of students to attend.
Maybe a larger, more accommodating WRC is unrealistic financially, but something needs to be done if the school is going to make demands that it
cannot accommodate.
