Welcome to the Tutor Cabin

Have I told you about my living situation? This should have been part of my earlier entry about daily absurdities.

You might be wondering how a publicly funded inner-city school could afford to hire 50 full-time tutors. Part of the answer is grants. The other part of the answer is:

In lieu of paying us an actual salary, my school provides each tutor with a stipend, housing, a bus pass, and unlimited laundry detergent. Basically, the school rents two triple-decker houses, and all the tutors live together in 8-person apartment units. Words I use when describing this living situation include co-ed frat house, commune, Branch Davidian Compound,* co-op, half-way house, and now, Tutor Cabin, which has replaced Milk Bucket as my favorite two-word phrase. It derives from a question recently asked of my friend and fellow-tutor by one of her students: "Miss, who lives in your Tutor Cabin??" See, the school never really established a policy on what we should tell the kids about our housing situation,** and the subject can be awkward with immature middle schoolers who are not ready to grasp the concept of co-ed habitation -- or perfectly well-adjusted middle schoolers who are not ready to grasp the concept of the majority of their school staff living together in a giant house, because, actually, yes, that's really weird. So there's a lot of curiousity and a lot of, apparently, misconceptions. I'm not sure exactly what this student was picturing when she asked about our Tutor Cabins, but I don't think she was too far off.

Another defining aspect of life in the Tutor Cabin is that, for reasons that are unclear but totally appreciated, the school provides all our basic household supplies. Every couple weeks we submit orders for tinfoil, wet wipes, etc. to one of those grocery-store-delivery-truck services, and on Friday all our supplies are shipped to school. An unintended consequence of this system is that from week to week and apartment to apartment, there ends up being no variation in brand or style of product. I am slowly forgetting the concept of consumer choice. There is just The Dish Soap and The Paper Towels. Basically, communism. (Keep in mind the only houses I ever see in this city are the other Tutor Cabins.) This past week something went wrong with our delivery order and my apartment ended up without sponges and with only two hand soaps. When my housemates told me about our rations, I said "I can't believe we didn't get any sponges and only got two hand soaps!" and then I laughed at myself. I actually bartered another house for one sponge before it occured to me that I could purchase one for like 12 cents.

Anyway, it's lights out time in Tutor Cabin 3. Good night, America.

*This one started after we all got matching sweatshirts, which we mostly all wear all the time around the house, so sometimes you walk into a room wearing your sweatshirt and realize there are seven people in the room in matching sweatshirts.

**Though we are rarely at a loss for policies.