It's Personal...

[Cynic]

I normally pack my clothes in boxes and all my books in my suitcases. Puts way less stress on my body to wheel suitcases of books around than to carry boxes upon boxes of books.

Artless: Good luck on the position.

[Ancient History]

http://imgur.com/a/M8x3u#0

[Artless]

Thanks Cynic! Like three days after, I also got news that I'd be in another show with the Light Grey Art Lab about game boss characters, so I'm cautious of the wrinkle to come. I'm unused to getting good news in such a short amount of time.

AH: That's a thing of beauty.

[Korgan0]

So, the town that I live in has a colossal number of wealthy families who have high academic expectations for their children. I have a therapist/friend (i've known him for about fifteen years) who works extensively for these families and local schools. I'm charming, speak well, have a cool accent, and a college degree in a writing-focused area, and the ability to do very basic calculus. There also happens to be a substantial demand for tutors in the area, for obvious reasons. After working as a waiter and phone salesman, this seems like a much better oppourtunity. I tutored a couple classes in college, but explaining how possible worlds work and cleaning up philosophy papers is very different to tutoring high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, I'd imagine.

Does anyone who's tried out the tutoring biz have any experience?

[CatharzGodfoot]

So, I've been medicated for about three weeks now. First time I had a shrink that didn't either drug me until I can't feel feelings anymore or just told me nothing was wrong. And every once in a while, I literally shudder about how batshit fucking insane my worldview was... even when I thought I was doing fine. I was a truly shitty person and I literally had no idea... This is going to be hard for me to take, but my doc has me starting talk therapy next month (he said based on my symptoms, any sort of talk therapy would be a waste until I found a medication to even me out, but it needs to happen soon after).

Find someone who will do dialectical behavioural therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy (they're basically equivalent).

Talk therapy is often helpful for people who are going through hard times. Drugs are great when the work and you can afford them. But CBT and DBT are the only forms of therapy I've even seen that work towards curing people who are mentally ill.

Good luck.

[Korgan0]

So, I've been medicated for about three weeks now. First time I had a shrink that didn't either drug me until I can't feel feelings anymore or just told me nothing was wrong. And every once in a while, I literally shudder about how batshit fucking insane my worldview was... even when I thought I was doing fine. I was a truly shitty person and I literally had no idea... This is going to be hard for me to take, but my doc has me starting talk therapy next month (he said based on my symptoms, any sort of talk therapy would be a waste until I found a medication to even me out, but it needs to happen soon after).

Find someone who will do dialectical behavioural therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy (they're basically equivalent).

Talk therapy is often helpful for people who are going through hard times. Drugs are great when the work and you can afford them. But CBT and DBT are the only forms of therapy I've even seen that work towards curing people who are mentally ill.

Good luck.

CBT did wonders for me (a dominatrix friend of mine was confused when I told her how CBT was the sole ray of sunshine in my life), in that when combined with SSRI's the two of them made me non-suicidal for the first time in about fifteen years. DBT I don't have experience with, but good friends of mine swear by it. There are, I think, three or four facilities in the US that specialize in DBT, mostly focused towards young adults. The rate of DBT uptake amongst individual psychologists is probably about as high. CBT is much more common.

[Maj]

So, the town that I live in has a colossal number of wealthy families who have high academic expectations for their children. I have a therapist/friend (i've known him for about fifteen years) who works extensively for these families and local schools. I'm charming, speak well, have a cool accent, and a college degree in a writing-focused area, and the ability to do very basic calculus. There also happens to be a substantial demand for tutors in the area, for obvious reasons. After working as a waiter and phone salesman, this seems like a much better oppourtunity. I tutored a couple classes in college, but explaining how possible worlds work and cleaning up philosophy papers is very different to tutoring high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, I'd imagine.

Does anyone who's tried out the tutoring biz have any experience?

What exactly do you want to know? I've run the gamut of tutoring ages - from preschool to college. Some clients were peeps who needed to not fail something, some were homeschoolers whose parents didn't know a subject. I don't work with special ed kids.

I've gotten clients by word of mouth, putting an ad in the paper (do they have those anymore?), craigslist, and talking to the counselors at the local schools (religious included). Since you're in a wealthy area, you can afford to charge more money than I do ($10 - $20) - I've sometimes worked for handmade Navajo jewelry because that's what my client could pay me in, and I'm easily bribed with that kind of thing.

Around here, Sylvan is currently charging about $65/hour for its services. When I interviewed with them, they had crazy high requirements for the job, but only paid their employees 1/6th of what they're charging. I wouldn't have worked for them even if I did have a teaching degree.

You will need supplies. I used a white board, textbooks (often not the ones the kids had), paper, pens... You will also need to decide on a venue - your place or theirs. Your price may change if you have to travel to them.

Usually the first hour is for assessment - you don't just jump right in to teaching something - you have to figure out what's wrong. And sometimes it's not obvious. Sometimes you'll find that you have no desire to work with the kids because despite what their parents want, the child is a pain in the ass and it's not worth the money to sit there and deal with them for the given time.

When you move up to high school, you can make bank with SAT and ACT prep - I never much cared for that, but people want it.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

CBT did wonders for me (a dominatrix friend of mine was confused when I told her how CBT was the sole ray of sunshine in my life),

I have a good friend who's a switch that taught me all about it. Definitely not something I would trust most people with...

[Prak]

I don't think they mean that cbt, Count. Pretty sure they're still talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I don't think they mean that cbt, Count. Pretty sure they're still talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

What I said could apply to either.

[Prak]

Fair.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I don't think they mean that cbt, Count. Pretty sure they're still talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

What I said could apply to either.

Nah. One of the great things about cognitive behavioural therapy is they don't really try to mess with you head. It's more about helping a person determine when they are acting crazy and know how to act non-crazy. Things like coming up with a list of good things to do when you're depressed -- because when you're depressed, maybe curling up in the fetal position on the floor seems like a better idea than taking a walk.

Honestly, it's probably one of the forms of therapy that requires the least trust, since it's minimally invasive of your personal history. Unlike having someone torture your genitals, which should of course require a lot of trust.

[momothefiddler]

So, the town that I live in has a colossal number of wealthy families who have high academic expectations for their children. I have a therapist/friend (i've known him for about fifteen years) who works extensively for these families and local schools. I'm charming, speak well, have a cool accent, and a college degree in a writing-focused area, and the ability to do very basic calculus. There also happens to be a substantial demand for tutors in the area, for obvious reasons. After working as a waiter and phone salesman, this seems like a much better oppourtunity. I tutored a couple classes in college, but explaining how possible worlds work and cleaning up philosophy papers is very different to tutoring high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, I'd imagine.

Does anyone who's tried out the tutoring biz have any experience?

Arrows. Draw arrows everywhere. Arrows make sense to even the most terminally confused student.

Other than that, go for it. Find out what things work for you, but have a lot of options, because what works for one student won't for another. Remember that the reason these kids are there with you is that there's some reason the base approach didn't work for them.

Maj is right about supplies. I had a small whiteboard that I used and it was very useful (though the giant blackboard I got to use when I was tutoring college was way better). Maybe the different colors? I dunno; it's not the same as paper at all (have some of that too).

I'd go with their place over yours. They can afford the extra cost, I take it, and the kid's gonna be more comfortable at their house, while you really don't want to bring strangers to yours, especially if there's some reason you need to break it off. Some kids might be too relaxed at home and not focus, in theory? But I've never actually encountered that. At that point maybe meet at the library or something....

I've charged $20/hr and been told that was low.

The hardest part for me was keeping up a steady stream of clients and scheduling things, but that was more my problem than anything about the job itself. I'd be a terrible freelancer.

Best of luck!

[Korgan0]

So, the town that I live in has a colossal number of wealthy families who have high academic expectations for their children. I have a therapist/friend (i've known him for about fifteen years) who works extensively for these families and local schools. I'm charming, speak well, have a cool accent, and a college degree in a writing-focused area, and the ability to do very basic calculus. There also happens to be a substantial demand for tutors in the area, for obvious reasons. After working as a waiter and phone salesman, this seems like a much better oppourtunity. I tutored a couple classes in college, but explaining how possible worlds work and cleaning up philosophy papers is very different to tutoring high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, I'd imagine.

Does anyone who's tried out the tutoring biz have any experience?

What exactly do you want to know? I've run the gamut of tutoring ages - from preschool to college. Some clients were peeps who needed to not fail something, some were homeschoolers whose parents didn't know a subject. I don't work with special ed kids.

I've gotten clients by word of mouth, putting an ad in the paper (do they have those anymore?), craigslist, and talking to the counselors at the local schools (religious included). Since you're in a wealthy area, you can afford to charge more money than I do ($10 - $20) - I've sometimes worked for handmade Navajo jewelry because that's what my client could pay me in, and I'm easily bribed with that kind of thing.

Around here, Sylvan is currently charging about $65/hour for its services. When I interviewed with them, they had crazy high requirements for the job, but only paid their employees 1/6th of what they're charging. I wouldn't have worked for them even if I did have a teaching degree.

You will need supplies. I used a white board, textbooks (often not the ones the kids had), paper, pens... You will also need to decide on a venue - your place or theirs. Your price may change if you have to travel to them.

Usually the first hour is for assessment - you don't just jump right in to teaching something - you have to figure out what's wrong. And sometimes it's not obvious. Sometimes you'll find that you have no desire to work with the kids because despite what their parents want, the child is a pain in the ass and it's not worth the money to sit there and deal with them for the given time.

When you move up to high school, you can make bank with SAT and ACT prep - I never much cared for that, but people want it.

The top-of-the-line guys around here charge around 150 an hour, and one of the new tutors is undercutting everyone at 50 per hour. There's serious money. Did you tend to focus more on the exact assignments, or take a step back into theory? Do you have any experience doing supplementary enrichment for homeschoolers?

[momothefiddler]

Did you tend to focus more on the exact assignments, or take a step back into theory?

Not Maj, but: I personally try to always make sure the theory is there, but I also tended to mostly just tutor math, with which I have emotional involvement. Still, I find that people learn better, retain better, and synthesize better if they understand the core concepts rather than just specific applications. On the other hand, time can be your enemy there, so occasionally I gave up and taught the specific assignments. Less-than-ideal, though, and not the performances that got me recommendations.

Do you have any experience doing supplementary enrichment for homeschoolers?

That's a thing? The homeschooling community I'm a part of would never have deigned to let an outsider tutor a kid - that was always an internal thing (so yeah, I did it some, but as a fellow homeschool kid).

[Maj]

The top-of-the-line guys around here charge around 150 an hour, and one of the new tutors is undercutting everyone at 50 per hour. There's serious money. Did you tend to focus more on the exact assignments, or take a step back into theory? Do you have any experience doing supplementary enrichment for homeschoolers?

I always stepped back into theory. My goal was usually to get a kid to pass a class, and you don't get that by getting one assignment right. But after theory, I did lots of repetition to make sure they had lots of practice.

I taught basic Spanish to homeschoolers, but I got fired for suggesting they practice by reading Harry Potter. So that was a short lived experience. It paid well and was consistent.

When it comes to payment - until you know you have a good client, payment is due upon lesson. I was very fond of payments in advance.

[Orion]

When they tried doing placebo studies on talk therapies, CBT was the only one that did better than a "placebo treatment". Obviously you can't do a double-blind study on talk therapy, and the notion of an inert fake treatment also makes no sense. What they did was have the experimental group be therapists people who adhered closely to the principles of one school, and the control group be eclectics, people who made it up as they went along, or people practicing methods the authors of the study didn't take seriously. Getting any kind of therapy at all helps. Getting nay kind of *attention* seems to help. But afaik, CBT alone has been shown to have special good properties, and they apply to a specific set of conditions, which makes me inclined to believe in them.

DBT is closely modeled on CBT, so it probably also works. There are a ton of studies going on now. (I know people who participated) I don't know if there's enough data yet to say for sure how good it is. DBT is based on a critique of CBT, particularly the ways CBT can fail to help abusive survivors and PTSD patients. Its improvements are based on advances in the physiology of emotion and on feminist cultural critique.

Unfortunately, It's also insufferably twee. CBT fails i some ways due to its unconscious commitment to American masculinity, but DBT's aesthetic often degenerates into a parody of American femininity.

[Ancient History]

<sigh> Preliminary ballot list for the Bram Stoker Awards are out. Sex didn't make it. I guess I'd hoped it would make the short list for nonfiction, but I reckon its a hard sell.

[AndreiChekov]

When they tried doing placebo studies on talk therapies, CBT was the only one that did better than a "placebo treatment". Obviously you can't do a double-blind study on talk therapy, and the notion of an inert fake treatment also makes no sense. What they did was have the experimental group be therapists people who adhered closely to the principles of one school, and the control group be eclectics, people who made it up as they went along, or people practicing methods the authors of the study didn't take seriously. Getting any kind of therapy at all helps. Getting nay kind of *attention* seems to help. But afaik, CBT alone has been shown to have special good properties, and they apply to a specific set of conditions, which makes me inclined to believe in them.

DBT is closely modeled on CBT, so it probably also works. There are a ton of studies going on now. (I know people who participated) I don't know if there's enough data yet to say for sure how good it is. DBT is based on a critique of CBT, particularly the ways CBT can fail to help abusive survivors and PTSD patients. Its improvements are based on advances in the physiology of emotion and on feminist cultural critique.

Unfortunately, It's also insufferably twee. CBT fails i some ways due to its unconscious commitment to American masculinity, but DBT's aesthetic often degenerates into a parody of American femininity.

Studies of various sorts (that I am too lazy to link) have shown that just talking to people, even if they have no experience in counseling or therapy helps.

On a side note, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians seem to have a low rate of depression and anxiety, because they talk about their problems in confession.

[Starmaker]

On a side note, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians seem to have a low rate of depression and anxiety, because they talk about their problems in confession.

Religious people in general are encouraged to underreport their mental problems, because having them at all is viewed as a personal religious failing that doesn't have anything to do with mental health and secular institutions.

	Suicide, per 100k	Guns, per 100
US	12.5	101.5
Russia	18.4	8.9

[Ancient History]

http://imgur.com/a/zyQ6C#0

[Prak]

So. my ex came over to grab a box of stuff of hers that I found while helping my parents move their storage locker.

She’s got a new boyfriend now (after a couple immediately after our breakup and a husband), and looked amazing. Seeing her, after quite a few years, especially all dressed up for a day with her current beau, got me creeping towards that familiar ledge to depression, thinking about how she looks, how happy she seems, and the fact that she's in a relationship.

Then I realized-

• She’s unemployed too, having lost her job after we broke up, and just happens to be happy playing housekeeper.
• The only reason she doesn't live with her parents is because she tries to always be in a relationship.
• To my knowledge, she never went back to college to finish the psychology AA she started while we were dating before dropping classes to be more available for work.

Meanwhile, I've-

• Been a manager and, while I kind of fucked up the whole thing, I learned a lot
• Am working on completing coursework for my second associates degree.
• Am writing and creating more than I did then.
• Now have people in my life who encourage me, actually accept my identity, try to help me when my mind decides to descend into psychological bullshit, and see me as more than a supplemental income, possibly repayed with sex.

So that helped a lot. Right after she left, my mind tried to tell me she's moved ahead in life, when really, all that's changed since she and I were together is that she now has a kid, there's a different body in bed with her, and she no longer has a job. I may not have moved far from where I was in those years, but I've moved forward to some extent, while she's moved a bit back and happens to be happy there.

I have this horrible tendency to see being in a relationship to be the most valuable thing in life. So my mind sees someone like her who pretty much only has to be single if she wants to be (and she never wants to be) as doing better than myself, who has a hard time talking to new people and huge self-confidence issues. I am in a sort of quasi-relationship, except that I don't really consider it much more than a close friendship, but it's really more of a "Too Complicated for 'It's Complicated'" thing. But, fuck, I have an AA in Culinary Arts, and am finishing an AA for transfer in Journalism. I may not have a job, but at least I'm doing something with my life.

[radthemad4]

Congrats dude. Hope things continue to improve.

[Ancient History]

I have this horrible tendency to see being in a relationship to be the most valuable thing in life.

That's pretty common, actually. Lots of people have a need to define themselves by who they're with. So, take comfort in the fact that it's not just you?

[Prak]

Well, and I think I'm getting better with that. My "Too complicated for "it's complicated" friend provides a lot of the emotional support that would usually come from a less complicated relationship, so while it sucks to not have a regular sex partner, I'm getting the emotional support I need, I'm getting further and further from the high school bullshit, and hormones that cause such, that says you need to be with someone or you're a loser, and instead of being surrounded by people who seem to be/are doing better than me and perpetuate that stuff, as I was in high school, I spend a lot of time on tumblr, with other millenials who are in the same boat as me, and I'm seeing it's not so weird, and can be overcome.

My overall good mood right now is probably also caused by the fact that I started to think about what I'm going to do after I finish this second AA, and, notably, I was addressing this myself, rather than someone else bringing it up, which allowed me to focus on my own goals and desires, rather than having someone else assume what they are/should be. I want to be done with school, being 27 and having been in one college or another for almost 10 years now, but an AA for transfer isn't that impressive, and I think I could stomach another year or two of college if I'm actually accomplishing things and have some financial aid/scholarships and can actually improve my life.

I'm still not sure I can get a job without starting my own business, but my life is slowly getting better. Three years ago, I was sporadically employed, not creating much, had no car and lived with my parents. Today, I may be only sporadically employed and living with my parents, but I have a car, and have averaged a blog post every three days for a couple weeks, and have gone farther in my game design attempts than before. I don't know if Midgard will be finished any time soon, or before I start working on another game, but each game I start writing gets farther than the one before, and I'm more confident in the decisions I make, so I'll have something to show with my name on it eventually, and my fiction writing is much the same.

So, journey of a thousand miles and all that.