evolved then over the years?

Well, I think at the beginning, when I officially began my business as a, with my most recent experience, when I began being just being a homeschool parent in the area, I really envisioned that maybe some people in our area would, who had done the same and maybe who knew me would want to utilize my services for academic tutoring.

The irony is that almost none of the students that I have in our practice homeschooled although some of them are but the majority of them are not the majority are private or public school students and I also had never envisioned that it would grow to the point that I would actually need to hire other tutors and it's been amazing just to see that the demand has been so great that I've had to hire three more academic tutors so that I can continue to develop the test prep side of my business.

Because I could see that as this was evolving, I was going to have to allow those students to start a relationship in tutoring with another tutor.

Or I wasn't having the luck of taking my current students and saying, now go to a different tutor, right? because you really do develop a special relationship with your students, even if it's just working through physics problems.

So this has been really great just to see that the demand has been there and that it looks very different than what I envisioned when I began.

What are some of your favorite aspects of working in test prep?

I think... that one of my favorite aspects is just to watch a student's confidence grow by following a system that you and I would know would work because of our life experience and just the longevity of test prep practice.

Hmm

... more recently, we're looking at a lot of, um, eco-catastrophe, um, films, and that's very much a way for us to begin to make this crisis thinkable.

There's a lovely thing that, I think it's Lisa Garthwaite, talks about that when it comes to these kind of overwhelming problems which are simply too vast and too complex to grapple with, we feel sometimes the tendency to kind of shut down, that it's too big and we simply cannot deal with it, so there's no point doing anything.

Um, but through speculative fiction, it can make these crises thinkable.

We can begin to inhabit one character who's moving through the world in a very particular way, who then encounters things, and we can see how they respond.

It becomes this, this way for us to begin to navigate a future which is otherwise too, too terrifying to contemplate.

Mm

... kind of at its best, that it can, um, support us to, to flourish.

[laughs]

Which he was entitled toMy mom didn't notice that at all.

She was not dissuaded from her little philosophy, and we marched on.

And so when the sole breadwinner of the family of 10 loses his job, that's no big deal.

You just pack up the kids and the pregnant Cocker Spaniel, and you move 100 miles from everyone you know and start from where you are.

[laughs] And, um, when the oldest of the stepchildren decides the best place to shoot himself would be on the interstate during rush hour- Oh ... you just kind of manage that situation and marshal on.

And when, you know, one of the stepsisters is killed in a robbery at the place she works, you just, you pick yourself up and you just go from there.

[laughs]