What have I been doing all this time, not writing in my webble?!?
Mostly, I've been feverishly trying to relearn everything I used to know about teaching ESL pronunciation so I can tutor my Taiwanese friends over their school break. It's taking me a lot of studying to be able to feel remotely professional enough to be charging them good money, but they insisted on the payment, so I'm trying. That's the stressful part for me. I want to make sure that nobody feels cheated here, so that our friendship will survive this teaching experiment. And I feel like I'm getting as much as I'm giving. But I guess work is ideally like that, even when you're getting paid.
It's been a big change for me, though a welcome one, to have ESL issues on my mind and teaching materials to prepare. For this experiment, I've been trying to see how much work I can fit in without feeling neglectful in my care of the kids, and so far it looks like I can handle it so far, though it does eat into my TV-watching schedule (hee hee.. probably for the best). During the tutoring sessions, Teresa colors or plays by herself (which she's really good at these days, especially with puzzles) or watches a video. She's been pretty cool about it, but I can imagine that if I was tutoring every day it would be too much and we'd need to set up some babysitting.
I've had a hard time writing about all that because I've been considering it an experiment that I don't know the results of yet, but then I decided that it was OK to just give the first half of the story. Maybe it sounds weird, but I often have a hard time talking or writing about things that are happening in the present tense, prefering to wait until they're over and I can get some distance and judgement before I let out my feelings about something. That works for short term projects and problems sometimes, but for long-term processes it's really detrimental to moving forward because my feelings and thoughts get stuck in one place. So I'm trying to be OK with talking about things that are still an unresolved mess and letting people in on them. It goes against my habits, so it's hard and I don't feel very graceful. Oh well, there it is.