Have I mentioned

that I love being an ESL tutor? No? Maybe I mentioned that I LOVE being an ESL tutor? That either. Well. Now you know.
Here is an excerpt from a letter to a friend about just HOW COOL it is:
I've started doing ESL tutoring, which is a blast. It requires a lot of mental and social energy because I have to analyze a paper and a person at the same time. It's like… you have to read the surface meaning of the paper, with all its grammar mistakes and awkward wordings, but also what the person was trying to say when they wrote it; you also have to think about it as just a paper, so, is it well-organized, does it have an intro and a thesis statement, do the ideas flow with one another and so forth. At the same time though, you have to read the author of the paper: are they comfortable, are they understanding you, are you being overbearing, do they know the answer and they just can't see it yet, or do they really have no clue? All while trying to get them to fix their work for themselves, without needing me to spell it out for them. ‘Cause oftentimes it’s an easy fix, but you don’t want to just say “you need to make this word plural,” you want them to see it. Because the goal is for the person to be able to self-correct and thus, write better in the first place. It's really fascinating, deciphering the paper and analyzing it as a thing full of two languages, and then talking about the nuances of English meanings and usages with the authors. I can tell from talking to them that they understand so much more than they can convey in their English words, that there’s a whole world lurking behind their broken sentences. It’s like peering through a keyhole. Sometimes I wish the meetings could last more than an hour, but I know that I'd be terribly exhausted if they did.

End of excerpt.

ALSO! Today I met with a girl who wanted help planning her paper- which is not technically what ESL is supposed to help with, they have the writing center for that (deals more with content and with Native English Speakers) BUT as it turned out, she was totally a TCK and as fascinated by languages as I was. So we spent an hour talking about categorical perception, IPA, how people learn languages, what languages we want to learn, etc. :D I cannot even TELL you how big the smile on my face was when I left.
anyways. So yeah.
I LOVE BEING AN ESL TUTOR. Just in case that wasn't clear.