A pleasure to read Dreamwidth

I had a friend on Facebook, the evil Facebook, who had cancer. An old childhood friend, and I followed her there to keep up with her health. Other friends, nuns and monks, my mother, were also Over There. So I disappeared for a time down the FB rathole. The algorithm's the worst. Any mood you're in gets intensified, you "like" one political post and then that's all you see -- although the Russian trolls have learned to leave me alone on my politicians' pages (if they annoy me, I call my representatives and tell them what great jobs they're doing--then I tell the trolls I called. They don't like that).

So refreshing to be back on DW, to read about your lives, your cats, your garden drainage problems. It's like coming home to humanity.

Rough night tutoring

Tutoring last night was rough. I had new students and students who'd been with other tutors suddenly switched to me, so my structure for the sessions couldn't be used.

Then my last session... oy vey. An AP US History teacher was behind, so his student needed to be taught US history, from scratch, from WWII to Reagan. At the same time, I had my ESOL student who's trying to take advanced AP Language English, at the same time, I was trying teach the SAT essay to a third student, and we have a new grader who's harsh-yet-vague in his comments, holding high school students to a college standard. That isn't how you help young writers, and I couldn't get across how these comments were Not At All Helpful.

The session was a disaster, I was upset, and I had to admit -- I couldn't do it. I haven't felt this incompetent in a long time.