Summer Schools and Summer Jobs

This is my desktop background at work.

Hey everyone!

By now, a few of you know that I recently found employment in Chinatown, but I'd like to elaborate on the details. Basically, about two weeks ago, some of the Americorps workers at the Pui Tak Center -- where I volunteer as an ESL (English as a second language) tutor and pronunciation teacher -- told me they had a summer internship position opening and suggested I apply. Well, I almost forgot about it, but applied at the last second and got the position! The job is about 30 hours a week with a $2000 stipend, plus a $1000 tuition waiver upon my completion of the program. With the tuition waiver, it works out to about $10 an hour -- and a big bonus to my resume.

My focus at the Pui Tak Center is twofold: (1) build a foundation of curriculum for future pronunciation teachers and (2) conduct an ACT Prep class for ESL high school students. I'm much more excited about objective (1), especially since they didn't tell me anything about number (2) until after they hired me.

In the meantime, I'm taking two classes this summer, which means I should be able to finish my masters degree by December. However, teaching at the Pui Tak has led me to reconsider pursuing my doctorate. It It's something I'm still quite wary of, but I'm becoming less and less off-put by the notion of teaching as a career. I've looked into the program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and I think there's a very good chance I could not only get accepted, but go entirely for free.

In addition to opening teaching opportunities, a PhD also means I will: (a) have a better shot at working for the Federal Reserve, (b) have a better opportunity to become a published researcher and writer, and (c) possibly price myself out of working for a baseball team. I'm not so sure about point (c), but it seems probable -- and disheartening.

Anyway, if there was one thing I would want everyone to pray about, it would be about this -- about school. I almost feel like God deliberately kept me from other job opportunities this summer (I turned down two jobs, and didn't hear back from dozens of others) so he could specifically get me to teach.

Outside of that, I shaved -- as many of you already know. Each day I wake up and say, "I'm going to grow my beard back today." And then I go shave again. I really feel like my hair is getting too long to not have a beard, but it's so hot outside!

Mom, when you get here, can you help Jamie give me a non-Mohawk hairstyle? We don't know how to do it.

In other news, Daniel graciously paid for this month's MLB.tv subscription! For those of you using that service, please be sure to thank Daniel! I've become too poor of late to afford that extra payment -- also our internet asplodes about every ten minutes.

I'm so excited about mom, dad, and Jessica coming to Chicago! Jamie and I keep talking about all the places we want to take our family, and now we will finally have a chance!

Short Poem

When I go to heaven, I will have this tightly held in my fist, and I will have a million co-authors write ahmen:

I called to God for help;
and when it came,
I had no idea
it would look like that.

At the beginning of the new year, Jamie and I were upset. We were going to a seeker-friendly church downtown called Willow Chicago, and we had settled on this church after several months of fruitless searching, even once visiting a unitarian universalist church by accident. Willow met at the Auditorium Theater, a famous concert house underneath my school, and had some thousand-plus members and visitors each Sunday. It was nearly impossible to see the same face twice, and though a desire to serve weighed heavily on my heart (I really wanted to use my writing and teaching talents to serve others), I kept meeting obstacles. Also, we both had agreed we wanted to take some sort of Biblical finances class so we could have a better grasp of Godly principles for our money, but Willow had no such programs. But the worst thing was that Willow's structure is predicated around the supposition that members can find a small group to plug into, to get deeper fellowship and deeper study; but the combination of our class schedules had prevented us from joining any groups in 2009. And so, when our schedules continued to conflict when the new, 2010 class schedules came out, we began to suspect this was a sign.