And if we are not properly understood, is it easier to expect our audience to change or is it easier to change ourselves to be more understandable? Is it more effective to complain about being victims or to take positive action to improve our lot? (Simpson 2) At a staff meeting held shortly after beginning operations in the fall of 1 992, the director of our writing center asked the staff to list and then discuss the values and practices we associated with the terms tutor and consultant} Since she had, from the beginning, been using consultant rather than tutor to describe the work done by our undergraduate staff, it seemed to me like a loaded question: were we "with the program" as she envisioned it or not? To me, consultantv/zs pretentious, more appropriate in the business world than in educational settings, and certainly I associated it with well-paid work. At that time, however, we depended on two English education courses to provide us with about sixty unpaid students that we needed to staff the center. Tutor , on the other hand, struck me as a respectable term, rich with meaning, history, and educational significance, despite its obvious associations with prescriptive learning. As I listened to my colleagues convey their associations with the terms, an uneasy feeling swept over me: they were decidedly with the program in a way I was not. Nevertheless, with what I like to think of as a certain amount of courage, when it was my turn to reveal my position, I voiced my reservations about consultant and my liking for tutor. After all, I had been a tutor, had willingly sought out students to tutor, and had done well by them and they by me. To denigrate or reject the term was for me to disparage a part of my past that I remembered fondly.