Brainstorming about my hero

Although I outlined my goals well yesterday, in the end I spent too much time on an idle challenge. It’s only supposed to take about ten minutes if I’m in the right place, but it took 30 minutes for the easy version and an hour for the harder version (which is what I want to do, but it only gets harder from here). I thought about cheating, but I realized that the challenge is probably my most important goal, so cheating would be almost as bad as using infinite points to make myself strong enough to beat everything. So I decided to not cheat and instead do another week of normal grinding in the hopes that things will be easier next weekend.

It was a productive day though. I spent almost two hours reading Japanese light novels. It would be better to read newspapers, but it’s a whole lot better than reading only English like usual. Also, I’m pretty sure I know what topic I will discuss in the meeting—classroom routines. It’s something I wish I had more control over, but it’s also something that everyone has experience with and they can probably contribute to a discussion about it. I did make a start with programming, but quickly found a new topic that I needed to research—error handling. I could copy previous code that I’ve used, but I wanted to feel like I understood what I was writing and why, so I decided to research it more before using it. I even made a start of reading about it.

For tomorrow’s first class at the junior high school, I have to write an example essay about a person that I like or respect. I need to write about three to four good characteristics of the person. My dad is always a good choice, but I’d like to make it a little more interesting if possible. I thought about doing something silly, but I don’t think that will go over well with the teacher. She is much more open to humorous English than any other teacher I’ve worked with, but I could potentially jeopardize the whole writing project which no teacher would appreciate. If I could pick anyone in history, John Milton is my go-to hero, but I feel like he would be quite removed from the students’ experience. It would be much better for me to choose someone that they know about. My knowledge of Japanese history and the extent of Japanese students’ knowledge of Japanese history is very sparse, so that’s probably a topic best avoided. But that only leaves famous modern people, most likely from Japan, which I don’t really know about.

Why do I like John Milton? He wrote great poetry and knew about so many things. He could speak and write in ten languages. He travelled a lot. He was uncompromising in his political beliefs. He was a teacher. He became completely blind, but continued to write via scribes, and in this manner he wrote his greatest poetry. Now, can I find a modern Japanese person that shares any of these traits? Hah, unlikely. Alternatively, I could search for stories about inspirational people.