This Sounds Like A Good Idea

I think I should be a tutor. I always have these near black-out moments when I fantasize about helping kids with homework. Not sexual fantasies...but those horrible ones that you have driving on the freeway where you can just picture the car smashing into the median and feel your face scraping along the concrete.

Note: My eyes are very quick to well up with tears. This is why I should be a tutor: I was reading the "Tutoring Notes" section on the 826valencia.org's Tutoring Notes page, and when one person recounted a scene with a kid who was just not interested in his paper, and making use of a gramatically incorrect and run-on sentence, I will demonstrate the scene without finishing the intial clause:

The kid hands the tutor a balled up piece of paper, which makes the tutor sad, but they don't show it. He was writing on "All Quiet on the Western Front" and this is the sentence from the post that this kid wrote: "The soldiers made lifelong friendships that didn't last very long."

And the tutor said it was the best sentence they'd ever read, and I thought to myself, this is the best sentence I've ever read, and then I got all teary eyed.

I feel like I could do this with kids and I have tutored before, but elementary school math is different than high, junior high student dealing with 'horrible' English papers. So I get really excited about that, and when I get excited I get teary. And when I've witnessed, or am talking about some great feat of human kindnes...

One time there was a BMW commercial on tv. The car is driving around a dark and wet road bordered with orange cones, and behind each cone is a man in uniform. The BMW makes this elegant curve and then pulls up beside a cone. A man reaches down, tightens the air cap on the tire, and the Beamer resumes it's arcing race against the length of the commercial. My eyes welled. You see the problem.

So my greatest fear about tutoring then is that I'll be so damn motivational and brilliantly life-changing, that I'll be running around as a weepy young lady until pretty soon none of the kids will want to go near such a soggy, freaky tutor.

Maybe one day I'll have nice fantasies of living in a hermitage...