{"id":618,"date":"2010-01-11T17:11:41","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T08:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/?p=618"},"modified":"2010-01-11T17:12:11","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T08:12:11","slug":"whats-up-with-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/11\/whats-up-with-you\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s up with you?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/lh\/photo\/sKvSFU2X52e6pCG_vhYZlg?feat=embedwebsite\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/lh4.ggpht.com\/_tPVAWD6nVDQ\/S0rOWxt60nI\/AAAAAAAAEDA\/12Jcb5P7d-I\/s288\/DSCN4085.JPG\" alt=\"\" width=\"288\" height=\"216\" \/><\/a>I know I&#8217;ve been a bit of an absent blogger lately. Work&#8217;s been kicking my butt, and I&#8217;m one of those people who falls into the &#8220;if I can&#8217;t do it perfectly, then I won&#8217;t do it at all&#8221; trap sometimes. So to combat that tendency a little bit, I&#8217;m going to throw up some information in what I know is a less-than-ideal format. That said, here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been up to recently:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I moved in with Yuko a few months ago. Her parents weren&#8217;t thrilled with the idea at first, but they&#8217;ve since come around, which brings me to my next point:<\/li>\n<li>I met Yuko&#8217;s parents yesterday. They were supposed to come out to Matsuyama around Christmas, but her dad hurt his back. They brought a carload of stuff, including enough food to feed a small militia for a few days. Luckily, Yuko is a fantastic cook, and the veggies her mom brought are all really fresh.<\/li>\n<li>I applied to JET for the 2009-2010 school year, and had to go to Guam in February to interview. This created a tricky timing problem. I had to tell <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ib-group.jp\/american\/english\/\" target=\"_blank\">American Language School<\/a> in April if I was going to renew my contract (set to expire in July), but JET notifies participants through May (and sometimes later) if they&#8217;re hired for positions starting in August. I ended up not renewing with ALS but not getting a JET position either, which leads to my next point:<\/li>\n<li>I started working for a different English school here in Matsuyama. I now work for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.miki-sp.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Miki Study Pals<\/a> (pictured at left), a school that caters to parents who can pay for their kids to become essentially bilingual. Even though the bilingual students only represent about 10% of the students at the school, they have a bit of a &#8220;halo effect&#8221;, much like the Toyota Prius makes people associate fuel economy with Toyota.<\/li>\n<li>I mentioned that work has been kicking my ass. I&#8217;ve been tasked with designing the curriculum for the last three months of the school year (January &#8211; March) for one of my co-teaching classes, and decided to go with a music unit. So I&#8217;ve been reading a lot of lesson plans, worksheets, and exercises that teachers have put out there on the web, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the kids, who are all around ten years old, and mostly bilingual. Then I had to wrap my head around the best way to organize and present the material. My first lesson was Saturday, and it went quite well. =)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think that&#8217;s all of the major stuff. I&#8217;ve done some traveling with Yuko recently that I should blog about. And I keep taking photographs of weird stuff with the ultimate goal of putting them up here. I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll figure out a way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know I&#8217;ve been a bit of an absent blogger lately. Work&#8217;s been kicking my butt, and I&#8217;m one of those people who falls into the &#8220;if I can&#8217;t do it perfectly, then I won&#8217;t do it at all&#8221; trap sometimes. So to combat that tendency a little bit, I&#8217;m going to throw up some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,83,4,26],"tags":[5,27,186,187],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-life","category-life","category-moving","category-work","tag-als","tag-lesson-plans","tag-msp","tag-yuko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":631,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions\/631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidhed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}