22.2.06

no no no no no! I do NOT want to tutor! no no no!!!!

no yuck I’m sick of tutoring! no! I hate it! I’m just a destitute French knowledge whore! if I have to sit there brainstorming with one more person I’m going to explode!! no no no!

OK obviously it's not that bad but I'm just really pooped. And well I’ve got myself into a total dead end for tutoring AGAIN this semester – 3 university students plus a middle schooler plus my Michelin guy (this last to the tune of 4-5 hours/wk)… Oh I know, I know… yay money blah blah blah… but the full pocket afterward doesn’t help my attitude when I’m anticipating each session all tuckered out and really just want to go home and do nothing… (cf. much-aforementioned and I'm sure still to be mentioned ad nauseum depression and general malaise)

The university students are at worst pretty painless and really are even fun most of the time (upper level majors and minors, all of whom are former students and are taking pretty cool stuff right now and are highly motivated). The middle schooler makes for quite boring sessions but at least she’s well-meaning and fairly motivated, just too calm really to help keep me awake very well, plus they go pretty slowly in her class so we usually spend the whole time drilling the same grammar point or vocab group. (Thank goodness for internet games is all I can say, especially the Hangman thing we found on Quia.) The Michelin guy is really really motivated and is much more prone to take my suggestions than the last Michelin person was plus he's a more manageable/improvable level and has more time to devote to it in off hours than she did. That all helps compensate for the fact that he has learned pretty much all his French despite a humongously bad ear and considerable dyslexia, both of which make finetuning very challenging, which is what we are pretty much aiming for now… Still the fact that he doesn’t balk at my ideas and actually works on stuff outside of our sessions is a huge step up.

Yeah whatever… obviously looking at all this more closely, it makes it seem pretty silly that I complain about it so much and yet I still dread it each and every time… The whole time I’m waiting for someone I’m secretly hoping they’re going to cancel at the last minute. So it's really just the fact that it produces 6 more commitments per week on my calendar and the fact that I'm overextended with class and ilw anyway, and the fact that much of the tutoring is necessarily scheduled at the end of days which are already pretty long. Again, my pocketbook would not be so happy, but I’m just really sick of this, even if most of it is much more pleasant than my usual crop of private students… sigh.

Eyes on the prize, Susan… Michelin money gets invoiced and therefore arrives in my bank account about 2 weeks after the close of each month. The others all pay cash or check so that is instant funds and is allowing me to pay off gobs on my debts because with all these students I am putting my AU money entirely towards bills and debt and not using ANY of it for regular spending. So all the groceries and incidentals, fun or otherwise, are coming out of tutor money with little or no major scrimping. I’m being thriftier about what I buy when and it takes some planning on occasion if there’s a big cat expense coming up, etc., but it’s all good.

So there. Yeah, linguistic whoredom, but I’ll be glad when I pay everything off.

Now back to dreading the arrival of my 4 o’clock…

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