Day 2- I Can Do Better Than That

Today's Challenge: Tell us about your job.

You might here me, sometime, complaining about my job or whining about being bored at work. But here's the truth: I love my job. The only bad part about my job is that the pay sucks and I don't get the hours that I wish I did. But while I'm actually at work, I love it! I'm a writing tutor for the English department here at school. Which means students come to me for help with papers, writing exams, etc.

The thing that I love about my job is that there really isn't a down side to what I do. If no one comes in for tutoring during my shift, I simply get paid to be on Facebook (or blog. whichever the case may be). And when someone does come in for tutoring I get paid to share my passion for words with someone. It doesn't get much better than that!

I love helping students with writing. The greatest part is when I take a student by surprise. They think they are coming in to have some loser correct their grammar and move some commas around. But, soon, after I have forced them to sit down and go through the paper with me, they are thinking in ways they haven't thought before, sharing ideas they've never shared, and expressed themselves in a way they didn't know they could. It's awesome to see a light bulb go off in someones head when they find that perfect word, or that perfect way to structure a sentence. And I learn something every time as well. One student can teach me that simplicity is just as, if not more, effective as complexity. Another can teach me that saying "well" instead of good can sound pretentious and just plain stupid. In short, I've learned that you can ignore the rules just as often as you follow them.

But most of all, I've realized that I have a talent for reaching out to people. Theatre is not the only tool I have to change someones life or help them. Sometimes you have to take someone's head, and force it to look down at a piece of paper, at their scene in a play, or at their life in general and realize that they "Can Do "Better Than That" (which brings me to the Title of this blog. Which comes from the Jason Robert Brown musical, The Last Five Years. Another HUGE favorite of mine).

I don't want to be a teacher. I hate the book keeping, paperwork, grading side of teaching. I don't want to be restricted to a curriculum. I want to be able to show people things in my own way. And being a tutor has helped me do that. I love tutoring. And I have a feeling I won't be stopping any time soon.

:]
-mikey-