Sometimes, You Remember You’re Lucky.
Talking to Em on the phone yesterday, I realized again how much I miss her. It’s good to have friends you can miss that much. I am really, really blessed that the people I call friends are smart, funny, interesting, and empathetic.
I know this, because I had a contrasting phone call today. E’s friend’s wife. You know, the annoying one?
She wants to talk about tutoring. She took a business course and ‘became’ a tutor. Wants to know how I get business.
Well, actually, I am pretty good at what I do. IF a spot becomes available, I ask a student’s mother if she knows anyone who needs tutoring. She invariably knows about three people who need tutoring. If I have an asshole student, I drop him (or her). It’s that easy.
I am dreading having to listen to this woman go on about her seven-point business plan and her trepidation at having adult male students and all the rest of whatever goes on in her brain.
Because, quite frankly, I don’t think I’d trust her to teach the ABCs. She has the empathy skills of a rhino, the intuition of a mollusc, and the patience of a kennel full of whippets hopped up on cantharides.
Some Stuff | Liz March 30, 2006
By Zen, March 30, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
I’ve also dealt with other people who can’t find work and when they ask me why it’s so hard to find a job when they’re certified, I always think of my old boss’ saying: “You can teach anyone anything – except how NOT to be a jerk.”
By Arwen, March 30, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
Oh. Did you tell her about all the armed robberies that you undergo? And the fact that you’ve gotten TB six times? Or the barfing? How they barf on you, constantly? You might want to insert those things into whatever conversation you have next.
By Liz, March 31, 2006 @ 12:59 am
Zen, I am constantly amazed at people who don’t know how NOT to be a jerk. How do they even make it to adulthood?
Arwen, I’d like to put her off with those, but the fact is, she seems unduly concerned with race. So far, she has a number of Persian students. I think she wants to break into the Korean market, because ‘Asians are so civilized and they’re not threatening or brown’ (paraphrasing her thoughts, some of which I heard at Christmas). So I could tell her about barfing, armed robberies, and TB, but she knows I teach Koreans, and she wouldn’t believe it of ‘those nice yellow people’. (Again, paraphrasing)