summercomfort | (no subject)

I love how sometimes things suddenly make sense after words come out of your mouth. Like, at the beginning of the sentence you're still confused and frustrated, but then these words come out and you're like "wait everything makes sense now."

The moment for me was Tuesday night. I was chatting with my bro about Chinese School stuff and I said, "Well, what if this wasn't the family business? Like, what if you just came across this organization normally? How would you engage with it, if at all?"

And then I realized that my answer to that question is "Volunteer for it and teach at it." Which explains why I feel so uncomfortable drawing a salary from this job -- I want it to be my outside volunteer thing, and not my primary job.

So then I made a list of the major parts of the organization and starred the parts of it that I'd want to volunteer to help do, versus the stuff that I'm doing just because *someone's* gotta do it.

Here's the list (bolded are the ones I'm actually interested in, underlined are things that I'm also currently doing but am pretty "meh" about):

- Curriculum
---> Developing new curriculum and supporting material
-------> Writing new textbooks/content
-------> Creating supplemental conversation material
-------> New Teacher Support website
-------> New student/website system
---> Maintaining current curriculum (updating pdfs, communicating with printers, etc)
---> Sales and Shipping
---> Teacher Support (interacting and maintaining relationships with teachers)
---> Managing Finances
---> Office Manager (hiring/firing, maintaining good office culture and environment)

- School
---> Managing Finances
---> Accreditation
---> Improving relationship with school site
-------> (involves teaching classroom management strategies)
---> Teach Chinese language
---> Teach Chinese culture

So some of the underlined things are temporary and will be done soon. Others I might eventually be able to farm out to other people. Regardless, it feels a lot better being able to look at it from this perspective. Every job has onerous parts, and knowing what they are (and their relative importance to me and to the organization) makes it much easier to deal with.

Also of note is that the stuff I'm interested in is primarily creative (creating new designs and new structures), and the stuff that I'm not interested in is maintenance.

Anyway: happy life update! \o/