Winter Vacation in Yosemite

For New Year's celebrations, I went up to Yosemite National Park with my fiancee and her friends. We hiked all around the Valley, in Hetch Hetchy, and up at Badger Pass. I was a bit camera shy in 2009, but the first 3 days of 2010 I shot these videos of the Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequioas and Hetch Hetchy:

New Year, No Post

With New Year's resolutions, I've tried to be more disciplined in my time use. Unfortuantely for my dwindling blog reading audience, that means that I haven't updated my blog in almost 3 weeks.

I'm trying to simplify my life, have less distractions, and finish things that I start instead of starting too many things that I can't finish.

I continue to substitute teach in the local schools. Travelling to new sites each day gives me an inside perspective on the school system so that eventually I can get hired for a full-time position.

My neighborhood continues to be uneventful. That's a good thing compared to my first night living here. But I've noticed some nice features of culture around: the ice cream truck that plays "little drummer boy" instead of "do your ears hang low" and the produce truck that brings the grocery store to the street side instead of residents walking a few blocks to go to the bodega.

We've had quite a cold snap here in LA. "Yea, right," I'm sure you're saying. But they showed Malibu with snow today. The mornings are cold here with air worthy of a jacket, but the midday sun warms me up so that I'll just wear a long-sleeve shirt.

Saturday is my big test day. I'm taking the day off to study for the CSET English test. My expertise is in linguistics, not composition and rhetoric, so I'm a little unsure whether I'll pass the test or not. I'll do my best.

I've started to teach an ESL class to a Cambodian community group. We're learning basic handwriting and phonics. Teaching immigrant beginning-English adults requires quite an array of things to be conscious of: respect for age yet simplifying material to be understood, keeping topics interesting enough for adult tastes yet needing to learn how to write and read before any other information can be transferred.

It is quite different from where I was last year: teaching very literate Japanese middle schoolers. I guess this experiences is giving me a broader skill set in ESL.