My essay...sheesh.

My biggest concern with the essay is that it hides under the grand title of "Bibliographic". I've never written a bibliographic essay before, and I'm mostly worried that I'll do it wrong. It's 15 pages, and it would be extremely frustrating to write that much, only to discover that I did it incorrectly.

That being said, I've decided to approach this like a research paper. My topic, Adult Learners, is one that doesn't really have conflicting viewpoints. It has a tentative beginning, and a field of study that several prominent researchers have contributed to. Only one man, Malcolm Knowles, has actually focused most of his research studying how adults learn.

I've got a few pages written already, and it's starting to look like a research paper (as I intended, although I'm not sure that's correct). You know, it has a thesis-ish statement that describes the field of Adult Learning as having begun when one guy said this, and has grown into something that every secondary/adult education institution concerns itself with.

I explain how Adult Learning (androgogy) developed, expound heavily on Knowles' theory (because he's the biggest name in the field) and then give excerpts and their corresponding explanations from several other authorities. The problem is, there really isn't much out there about "Tutoring Adult Learners". It seems that everyone has focused on how adults learn, and that everything else has to be applied inductively. No paper came out and said, "oh, you should use these strategies for tutoring adults." Instead, they said something like, "Adults are receptive to these types of learning approaches," and left me to assume that I could apply them to my tutoring.

So that's the deal. I'm trying to do my best, but this is just a little difficult to grasp mentally. It's interesting, though, so I'm enjoying the learning I'm doing for this. Thanks for letting us pick our own topics (because otherwise this would be really unbearable! :-)