After unsucsessfully trying to come up with a flow chart displaying the “right way” to run a tutoring session, I eventually decided to go with what I know. Since no two tutoring sessions are alike, it is essential to be able to follow your animal instincts, laugh at yourself, and remember that a smile is a universal ice-breaker. So without further adieu, this is how I run a tutoring session.

I missed the class discussion of Bartholomae on Wednesday, so I hope I am not too far off with my interpretation of his notion of discourse communities. I think Bartholomae is right when he says that students basically have to conform to the expectations of the teacher or the program in order to be sucessful students. This “Burden of Conformity,” as Bartholomae puts it, is knowing what your audience wants, and then producing something within those strict guidelines. This is a hard enough task to accomplish in one area of study, but becomes even more challanging when students have to be flexible enough to apply themselves to several discourse communities, which all have different rules and guidelines.

I have had to learn a new discourse as a zoology major. For someone who has always been more comfortable taking humanities courses, chemistry, physics and zoology is a huge adjustment. Not only do the sciences have an entirely different approach to education, but the rules are also completely different. This is where I can see the idea of discourse communities most clearly, as I experience the frustration Bartholomae discusses as students are expected to “work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an arugument are both distinct and even to a professional, mysterious.”