I went to a tutoring conference up at UMass Lowell this Saturday. It was cool and well put together, although I think I expected to get more out of it than I did.

One of the presentations I went to was on tutor burn-out. I went to it because I am very very burnt out. One of the suggestions of combating burn out was to do journaling, and since I haven't posted in a while I've been inspired to post. But I don't have too much to say. Or time to say it.

When I first started tutoring I opened up basically all my non-class hours for appointments. I'm taking 16 credits, which includes a 2 hour physics lab, so essentially I have 17 hours of class. There's a mandated maximum of 20 hours per tutor, so I can't pass that, but I'm come quite close to it sometimes. I've been averaging around 15 hours a week I believe. If I end up getting a lot of no shows every in the week, they jam my schedule up later in the week with appointments. Last week I went from having 3 appointments on Thursday to having 7 or 8.

I'm basically overloaded, and I don't really know what I can do about it. I do enjoy tutoring, and get paid for it. I have a lot of tutees who count on me for help and I'd feel bad if I had to give certain ones up.

Unfortunately, it's basically the reason why I have no time for anything right now, and why some of my recent work has suffered. Granted, I got A's on both the writing assignments I did in a last minute furor, but then I got a 70 on my Differential Equations exam, and an 80 on that Physics quiz (could of been worse). The Diff EQs grade is baaad because I'd really like to get an A and that test is about 10% of my grade (should be 16% but my professor devalues the lowest grade). I have an honors seminar I haven't been doing the appropriate amount of reading on, and an honors component in my English course that I haven't done ANY work on. I have an Exam in English on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure tomorrow and other for in class readings and the movie I don't know anything. And there's a Physics take-home due Wednesday, another Diff EQs exam Friday, and especially for Diff EQs I haven't done any of the homework that the exam is on (which is why I got a 70 on the first exam).

This hasn't helped much, I still feel very tense.

Off me...

I've realized that I really enjoy partaking and listening to human conversation. I had a very intriguing discussion on the ride home from the tutoring conference with the two adult women/moms/students who me and my friend and fellow tutor were riding with. It touched on many different subjects, from professors and classes, to psychological theories, master programs, and parenting. I don't think I would have said this 5 years ago when I was 16 and a pathetic loner. There's a certain human knowledge element of conversations I find interesting. Even if I'm just listening and absorbing as much information as I can remember.

Also, I've "discovered" Pandora, a music matching program that plays streaming audio of the music it matches you with. It's pretty cool, but I don't know if it'll stick. It'd be nice if it'd play in a regular music program rather than the web. And sometimes it's nice to play your own stuff, like live recordings you have over forty gigabytes of.

Sigh. Still tense. I think I'm going to go dance like no one's watching to Maroon 5.

Tags: bcc, college, life, stupid me, tutoring
Current Mood: tense
Current Music: Matt Nathanson - Answering Machine (live)

It's good to be back in school.

I have my first tutor appointment tommorrow in PSY 51 (General Psych), I'm really excited. It's good that it's a class I've actually taken, albeit two years ago, and one that I really enjoyed. Hopefully that makes it easy to tutor. I just hope that I don't suck.

I still haven't really done the essays, but I know that I need to do them and I really want to do them. My plan tonight is to relax for a little bit when I get home after Physics Lab and then refresh my Psychology knowledge and work on putting some fingers to keys and put some 0s and 1s in a file. I may decide to stay up late to force myself to write something soon.

Getting up early for Physics/school in generally doesn't totally suck as I expected it to, but it's still a bummer. Haven't looked into moving to Fall River other than thinking about it. I also don't know if I could financially swing it, especially after Neteller stopped accepting poker transactions, the easiest/quickest way of getting money I win into my bank account. I may have to start using credit cards in the evil debt collecting way soon so I can work my way out without being broke.

It's not as bad as it sounds, I can still play poker and win enough and eventually get money out through various ways. I also started propping at a poker site where I can make about $20/hr per table playing 4/8. Propping is when a poker site pays you to start new games and keep games going, so it's a very nice deal with 150% rakeback at 4/8. That is a sick amount of money if I could actually get off my ass and play for a long period of time, but as I really want to get this Amherst stuff done I'm going to take a break for a little bit and hence why I really don't want to write too much about it.

Otherwise, all my classes seem pretty good. I think this may be quite a hard semester though, with Physics and Diff EQs, the Sociology honors seminar, Philosophy, and the ENG12 Lit class. I'm pretty tired right now. Not sure if it's because of lack of sleep or because at this time yesterday I was working out really hard. The Fitness Center is cool.

Also, I've always done this, I don't know if anyone else does, but I always end up imagining how people feel, what conversations with people might be like, guess what people might be doing or thinking. I seem to generally be wrong and conversations end up not how I would imagine them. I think I'm a little disturbed in this area, I'd like to blame it on being an INTJ or being very aware of other people's conciousness. Or maybe not. Regardless, the point I'm thinking about/making is that it seems like anytime I expect a certain response from someone (like, say I don't do something and except negative harsh criticism), I'm wrong about it or it's not exactly what I was imagining. In this way I think for some sick reason I underestimate the human nature of life, being so hermitly introverted. Just something I was thinking about based on a few recent encounters.

Tags: bcc, life, poker, school, thoughts, tutoring
Current Location: computer lab
Current Mood: contemplative