I have been reunited with my first love at home... my trusty N64! I've forgotten how much I love playing video games. (As I tried explaining to Kris today, I'm not like most girls.) I've played so much that my thumb hurts. It's from using the up button as Yoshi in Super Smash Bros. (For all those Yoshi fans, you know which move I'm talking about!) But I figure I better get all my playing done before I start work on Monday.

I'm real excited about meeting my students this year. Ever since school got out for me, I've already been planning different ways to teach my classes better. I'm thinking that this year, I will take the practice tests with my classes and challenge them to try to score better than me. If they score higher than me, I will take them out to the restaurant of their choice. I figure that I'd do this since I honestly don't think that my SAT scores qualify me as a good tutor. If it weren't for my patient nature, I'd have no business teaching SATs, so I'm gonna take the tests with my students as a way to justify my job to my guilty conscience. But I know that not all of my students will be able to beat my score (or else it would probably be real embarassing on my part) so I'm also gonna set a goal for each student to reach, somwhere along the lines of a 200 point increase. (I always request the low-scoring students, so it's definitely do-able.) If ALL my students reach the goal, then I want to treat the whole class to dinner at Buca's. I know it'll probably be expensive to do this, but my pay is ridiculously high for the little amount of time I actually work. I would much rather use the money I make back on my students. Anyway, the money's not important. What's important is when a student comes up to me on graduation day and tells me that she used every technique I taught her on her SATs and that she scored so high that her parents were very surprised and happy. What's important is when a student remembers the corny jokes that I tell in class and is actually able to use it on test day. And what's important is that I am able to teach my students all the things I know about the test to be able to overcome their anxieties about it. I'm excited and a bit nervous, but I definitely look forward to Monday.