2022: a very brief year-in-review

It was honestly difficult to think of highlights from this year. 2022 passed in a sort of fog, and right now, my brain is like a pothead wheezing, "What? It's over?" A few thoughts did come to me, though. Let's do a quick review.

Early in the year, I wrote and self-published Think Like a Teacher, my small contribution to the burgeoning homeschooling movement. In this booklet, I discuss ten things a teacher needs to do, phrasing my chapter headings as commands: know your goals; have a plan; have standards, set boundaries; be patient; be consistent; learn while you teach; research, research, research; think carefully about testing; provide success experiences and keep things interesting; think like a teacher. I didn't market the book well because I suck at marketing, but it's still selling a copy or two every few months—not enough to gain fame or fortune, but enough to affirm that I exist. Once I discovered how low-quality the paperback and hardback versions of my book were, I restricted sales to the ebook only. I need to find a way to make people aware that they can buy a hard copy of the book from me directly.

Part of my marketing strategy, such as it was, involved learning about the morass known as Reddit so I could post about my book there. I quickly discovered that Reddit was mostly a toxic place full of rabid stupidity, but the r/homeschool subreddit proved to be a haven of earnest people actually helping each other with their various homeschooling needs and problems (contrast that with the mostly negative r/teachers subreddit!). I frequented that subreddit for a few months, and even now, I go back there on occasion for a few minutes, but I don't think that Reddit is, overall, my kind of place. The homeschooling subreddit might be all right, but the rest of Reddit is a subculture I want nothing to do with.

That was the winter/spring of 2022. I was supposed to be working on a much larger, more ambitious book project as well: my huge book of movie reviews. But that has been slow in coming, and I'm very behind, so I have nothing new or good to report. After a miserably hot summer (summers in Korea are always miserably hot), let's fast forward to the fall. My long walk this year was a two-parter: I went to Jeju Island and walked the coastal perimeter, then I flew back to the mainland and walked along the Nakdong River for four days, spanning the distance between Sangju City and Andong City. Jeju was lovely, but I liked the Andong path better, probably because it felt more like the Four Rivers path. In fact, I discovered that the path I was on was a gukto jongju of its own (a country-spanning, end-to-end path), so I now know of three such paths: (1) Four Rivers, (2) east coast, and (3) Nakdong River. The Nakdong River gukto jongju goes from the Andong Dam to Sangju, then all the way down to Busan. The Sangju-to-Busan section, then, coincides with the Four Rivers path, whose final part is that same section. I imagine there's a west-coast gukto jongju as well, and maybe a south-coast one, but I'm not keen on any more coastal walking on the mainland. By contrast, I'd be willing to walk along the Jeju coast again: it's much quieter.

To cap off 2022, there's the craziness I'm involved with now as my entire R&D team has been disbanded. The CEO had a possible change of heart, though, and we're in the process of finding out whether the team can get a new lease on life by working directly under the CEO as his tutors and his content-creation team. That's all still up in the air.

So as with previous years, 2022 has had its ups and downs. I didn't suffer a second stroke, so I'll consider that a plus. I nevertheless need to get back to serious dieting; I spent much of 2022 regaining the weight I'd lost the previous year, and it shows. So come the new year, I'll gather myself up, gird my loins, and try, try again. I hope you also look forward to the new year in a spirit of hope. Good luck to us all in these crazy times.