In August I will conducting some teacher training, specifically I’ll be working on ‘Teaching Reading in Korea’.  Although I was given the task last month, I drove off the actual writing until this past week.  It’s not like I haven’t been working, actually a lot of background reading and internet research went into it.  But writing didn’t start until Monday.  So I’ve  been up late all week.  On average I was getting about three and a half to four hours sleep per night.  Thursday night was the push to the finish.  I completed the work at 5:30am and was up again to get ready for work at 6:30.    It’s the first time I’ve written academically since way back in 2030.   Back then it was math papers on things like Simpson’s rule, and the Archimedes method for capturing pi.  Of course it wasn’t just writing papers, it’s writing them in a form called LATEX.  If writing a paper is cooking something from scratch, then writing in LATEX is like growing the vegetables, harvesting them, and raising the cow yourself.  You don’t just worry about what you are writing, you worry about what codes you have to type to italicize something how to ident something or where on the page to place a figure or diagram.  Then you have to run the codes through a compiler to see what the paper looks like.  If it looks bad, change the codes, run the compiler and have another look at the paper, if the steak is too rare, raise another cow.

Anyways back in 2030 I actually would live on campus day and night writing those papers, I’d do it for a week at a time, going home long enough to get a shower and change of clothes.  So while this week wasn’t that intense the late nights did take me back.  Friday was also open class, and although I only had an hour of sleep I still did my part pretty well.  I wasn’t really fond of the lesson itself, but I taught it as my co-teacher wanted.  This year is all about managing expectations.    All that remains now is to prepare the summer class programs for my elementary and middle school.  My vacation this year is the last half of August.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll do.  The road trip last year will be pretty hard to top.  I may do it again, I kind of rushed part of the trip last time because I ran out of cash in Tongyong.  Plus I’ve got a 250cc motorbike now. Bigger, better, longer… Road Trip 2.o?