"In The Parking Lot, In The Headlights Of Cars"

So, the car that was blocking me in was still there this morning. Thankfully, I thought far enough ahead to wake up early (which was a bitch to pull off: I was dead tired 'cause I couldn't fall asleep last night) and leave early enough to walk to work (which takes less than twenty minutes, as it turns out, but it's not really something I want to do when it's so freakin' humid outside). Work itself was pretty good: I'm still doing training, but they actually let me interact with students today, and I think I did pretty well. I only have two more days of training (though the last one of those is just me acting as a "floater," moving from zone to zone and just helping any students with immediate needs; Monday's session is learning how to work in the math zone, and you know that if the kids have any serious math questions, I'm going to prove completely useless. But my boss knew my math skills were lacking from the outset, and I am there primarily as a reading and writing tutor, but she says I still need to at least see how the math system they use works).

This job is very different from my two previous tutoring jobs. Those were both based more on what I as a unique individual brought to the table: my ability with history, my personal relationship with the students I was tutoring, and (at Ozarks) more based on content knowledge than anything else. The Writing Center was built on the unique strengths of the individual writing consultants; what our specialties were (history, English, various other humanities, etc.) and how we brought our personal understanding of writing essays and research papers to bear on a particular student-athlete. Both jobs focused on flexibility: if one approach with a student didn't work, try something else. Approach each case individually, as something that very well might be totally different from what you just dealt with.

Huntington operates on a much different premise. With their cirricula programs, they strive to make the teachers almost interchangable. The idea is that any one of us could walk in without a moment's preparation and start helping a student with whatever they were working on. Who the tutor is doesn't matter so much, nor does the tutor's individual strengths or approaches. Everything is subsumed to the programs. I can see the sense in it: they deal with numerous students at very different skill levels all day long; they may not even see the same student from day to day, even if the student shows up several times in a row. I did actually get to bring my personal abilities into play at least once when helping a student understand why a certain answer she'd written down was incorrect. I got the chance to explain and ask her questions and help her see why what she'd chosen was not the best possible choice. That was good. And there will be more instances of that. But I don't feel the connection or devotion to this place that I felt to the Learning Center at Ozarks or the Writing Center at OU. The other teachers are, as far as I'm concerned, interchangable even to me. They all seem decent enough folks, but I don't know that I'll develop much of a connection with them. Certainly not as deep a connection as I had with my peers at the jobs at Ozarks or OU. But that's okay, since this job is just a bit of supplimentary income while I try to find a real job.

Which really segues quite nicely into the completion of the parking story. When I got home from work this afternoon, the van was no longer parked behind me. However, I saw the woman who drives the van pulling into a different driveway down the way. I thought nothing of this, though I made a pointed and obvious show of hitting the garage door opener I'd carried in my bag and standing in the driveway waiting for the door to go up.

Dismissing the woman from my mind, I walked up the stairs and into the apartment. After getting Obe off the top of the refridgerator (hey, it's the highest place in the room and he's not allowed to be up there, so of course he climbs up there at every available opportunity), someone knocked on the door. Slightly confused by this (my friends aren't supposed to arrive until this evening, after all, and I thought we'd got the air conditioning stuff all worked out by now), I open the door and see the woman who'd parked her van in my driveway. Turns out she and her husband are the building leaders, which is the apartment complex equivalent of dorm RAs (only without the enforcing curfew and no drinking policy crap and such not). She'd apparently been given permission from the woman who owns the condo that the garage is attached to to park in that driveway if she needed to, but hadn't realized that we'd since rented the garage from the owner. She apologized profusely (apparently firmly-worded-yet-polite notes under the windshield wiper are effective) and chatted with me briefly, discovering that I'm on the lookout for teaching jobs. Turns out she's a middle school art teacher at one of the local middle schools, and she offered to check with her principal on any history/social studies jobs at her school and put in a good word for me...and this is after she'd seen my annoyed note, mind you. So instead of having a tiff or an argument with this woman, I ended up making something of an ally and friend (which is really about as nice a conclusion to a frustrating situation as you could ask for). And on top of that, she's not gonna park in my driveway anymore.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Nirvana, "All Apologies"