Patience is Virtue

June 4th

"Patience is Virtue" is the motto I had to keep saying to myself all day.

Two things:
2) Study/FAFSA
3) Work

As for all the college students out there, you guys know how much of a pain FAFSA can be at times. Sure, it's helpful, but the process sucks and you're not guaranteed to get money from the government.

I'm not going to talk about the "getting money from the government" aspect of it right now, but the process of doing it/correcting it. There was no trouble the first time my dad and I filled it out. But when we needed to correct it (twice, actually) the FAFSA ID/Username/Password thing just does not seem to like me. It hates me, really. I had to reset my username, password, AND secure code. I had to reset all of my dad's information, too. I did not have the patience to deal with it, but my dad wanted me to finish it by today. Correcting my FAFSA drained the life out of me.

Once again, Annika: "Patience is Virtue."

When it came to my studying, I gave up.
I laughed a little bit because I would usually much rather study for hours than have to deal with having to correct my information all day, but once I opened my Biology book to read about the cell theory, I slammed my forehead on the book and groaned.

Yeah, no patience there.

Finally, I had to go to work.

It was my first day back at Kumon since last summer. Kumon is kind of like a tutoring place where children get classwork and homework to get them ahead for the next school year. There are some students over the school year, too, but it's the busiest over the summer.

I like working at Kumon. It's in a classroom setting, and I get to work with children. The part I hate about it the most is grading because trust me, these children get a lot of homework during the time they're not in the classroom.

My shift started out well. I was working with my best friend of eight years now, and we were bragging to each other about how good our kids were. My first student was my next door neighbor, who I didn't even know went there. He was really studious. He worked quickly and accurately. We didn't have to do any corrections on his math or writing at all! I felt so proud of him -- I've known him since he was born, and the most academic thing I have ever heard him do was how he got an award for his reading at school. But now I know how good he is at math, and how much he enjoys it. That really made me happy.

Despite the good start, there is always one child that will get on your nerves. Teachers know this.
In my case, I had twins.

Oh, lordy. This is when I started chanting in my head, "Patience is virtue!" Both of the twins were easily distracted, asked me questions every five seconds, tickled each other, and stole each other's pencils. It was driving me crazy. I am never having twins.

Of course, I just had to remember that I used to be one of those annoying children, too. Maybe not as bad as the twins, but I did ask stupid questions when I was younger and I used to be easily distracted.

To make it worse, after teaching the children, I had a nice pile of homework to grade. See, teachers deal with having to grade very similar homework in one night, so that they could give the papers back to the students. However, at Kumon, the homework are not similar to each other at all. We have to grade every student's homework, which means I could be grading 1 + 1 for one student, and then some kind of Algebra 2 mathematics for another. I wish I could say that I'm one of those people who like to sit still and not mind a desk job, but I would much rather stay standing all day. My pile was so nice that I worked an hour and fifteen minutes overtime.

At least I get extra moolah.

My post today has been one big rant.

And I thank you for reading through it all.

I hope you all had a much better day than I did, and that you were all much more patient than I was.

Remember that there will always be a day where we will feel irritable from the tiniest things in life (like correcting the FAFSA), and there will always be a day when you will not be around people you would much better off without (like the twins), but in the end, we will always survive. Just take deep breaths, be patient, and get some beauty rest at the end of the day.

Here's to another day. :)



Much sun,
Annika.