Mid-terms are Over!!!
I think I’m just as excited as my students that mid-terms are over. I feel like I used to at the end of final exams in college — totally wiped out.
I have 14 students and 7 subjects. I’ve been putting in over 20 hours per week, which is a lot tutoring. Teachers generally teach 6 hours out of 7 and only one to a few subjects. I also have no benefits, but I love the flexible schedule. It allows me to have a business and blog.
I love tutoring, though, because I get to work one-on-one with my students and when they succeed at something that’s been hard for them I’m so proud of their progress. Sometimes they credit me for their improvement, but it’s not me that’s doing the improving. I’m only helping them to understand their subject better. They do the learning and the work. It’s their success. I can tutor and help a student from now until doomsday, but if that student doesn’t want to improve, he or she won’t improve. So when a student improves it’s because they learned from me and were able to apply that new skill or knowledge to perform better in class and on tests.
It’s the greatest feeling in the world when something you do makes such a big difference in someone else’s life. No amount of money could cause that feeling.
However, I do have to make a living. My current pay rate is $19/hour, so this month I will bring in about $1170. It may be a little more because I’m working with a student who is catching up over the break due to a hospitalization. I’m not sure how many hours we’ll get in before the end of the month.
I’ll also be getting a refund from my divorce attorney from a couple of years ago for a medical payments reimbursement issue I was facing. I’m not sure how much that will be, but I’ll take it. My ex and I worked out our own deal to reimburse me for out-of-pocket medical expenses based on our original support agreement and I didn’t need to have my attorney involved. All she ended up doing for me was writing a letter to get the ball rolling.
That’s really the best way to do it. By now we’ve been divorced long enough to be able to talk things out concerning our son without a court having to be involved. We learned that whatever we do, it has to be in his best interest, so we’d better figure that out and live by it, and we can do it on our own. I think we’ve finally learned how to be grown-ups about dealing with joint custody issues. We have our disagreements, but we’ve agreed to disagree, we don’t discuss those issues unless we have to, and we work it out from their.
I’ve got to get my blogging earnings up. I’m about to do lesson two of the Blog Mastermind class I’m taking. I’m also going to finish my home office organization project and then sell that blog because I just don’t have enough passion to keep writing about it. I’m also selling my red beans and rice recipes blog. There are a lot of other people out their much more suited to those topics than I am. If any of you, my readers, are interested in those two topics, I will be learning how to value their current content soon, and I’ll be putting a sales price on them.
I haven’t decided what I’m doing with my Invader Zim Episodes blog. I have been able to post to it somewhat regularly, and I really do love the show. I only wish it came on more often.
The blogs I’ll be keeping and posting to regularly are:
- Debt Free or Bust (this blog)
- Hurricane Katrina Pictures
- My Thirty Day Challenge 3.0
- On Being the Change I Wish to See
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
