3 or four things from the readings and their influence on my tutoring

First, I'd like to say that each of my four things come from last week's article. I found the article to be very interesting in light of issues I've been noticing concerning hierarchical relatiosnhips in the writing center. One idea presented in the article comes from John Trimbur's "Peer Tutoring: A Contradiction in Terms." Trimbur points to the "uneqal positions tutor and tutee often hold in terms of rhetorical knowledge and academic success" (CWH 97). With the recent wave of freshmen in the writing center, the inequality of the respective positions of the tutor and tutee becomes grossly apparent. The gap complicates the ideal of an equal, comfortable, and reciprocal collaboration. With these students, assuming the stance of peer tutor rather than "sage teacher" and thus providing each of the participants an equal share of authoity/power is difficult.

Second comes an idea presented by the author of "Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring" herself: "None of us likes to feel less empowered than another in interpersonal relations, students who enter writing centers should be made to feel as comfortable as possible" (98). Where does the tutees' comfort fall in the tutor's list of priorities? Personally, I find this author's emphasis on the comfort of tutees to be problematic. First and foremost comes the tutees' writing ability. Often, a mutual attempt made by the particants in the writing conference to improve the tutees' writing will be uncomfortable.

THREE: "To engineer peer tutoring techniques that divest the tutor of power and authority is at times foolish and can even be unethical. Yet to some degree, that is what writing centers have done. Much tutor training routinely includes community-endorsed noninterventionist claims, if not dogma, that instruct tutors to never hold the pen, neve write on a studnt's paper, never edit a student sentence or supply language in the form of phrases" (98). Are such instructions dogmatically and universally applicable in the writing center? There have been times, albeit few and far between, in which my providing a possible wording might have allowed the tutee a positive oppurtunity to discover their own potential for communication. They don't have the idea for a better wording; nor do they come up with a better wording when notified of a problem. Might I present an option to the tuttee if only to expose him/her to a new tool for the articulation of an idea?

FOUR: "Irene Clark . . . attributed the community's long commitment to nondirective peer tutoring not to saintly