The guy who teaches our kids' aikido classes has had to resign due to time pressures. We're taking the opportunity to re-make the program in a more sensible and disciplined way, so my teacher is taking over; but she offered/asked if I would be interested in doing it until I leave town. I helped in the classes yesterday, and I'm a bit short of enthusiastic; I'm teaching them on Monday, as she's out of town (a brown belt friend will help me), but I think I probably don't want another commitment right now, even a small one. Kids are draining.

Speaking of leaving town, WorldTeach called this morning, unusually enough, and said, "We've got some bad news, and some good news that will hopefully make the good news okay." It turns out my Chile program, DuocUC, has been canceled, based on a lot of thought and feedback from the volunteers of the past three years. She said that volunteers had certain expectations of what it meant to be working as a volunteer teacher, and Duoc didn't really meet those expectations: which is a feeling I've had myself. Duoc is an urban post-secondary institution, sort of in the continuing-education vein, and my sense is that normally teaching there would be a paid, professional position: it's not really aimed at people who don't have the resources to learn from professionals. That was a little irksome, but I figured it would still be worth the experience.

The good news is that for those of us who actually confirmed our participation in the Duoc program--apparently there were only a few of us who actually had our shit together--they're offering us places in the Chile Ministry program, with a scholarship to cover the difference in price. That program is in smaller settled areas, and the teaching is being the English-language assistant to a Chilean teacher instead of running my own classroom. So I dunno. I get a little tired thinking about it right now, so I'll let it sit; the other options are to try and go to Ecuador and Costa Rica.

Just to keep me on my toes.

I'm reading Born to Run, and you should too. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but also has a bunch of information and stories about the reality of modern running shoes, which is that, as with childbirth and diet, medicine and industry decided that millennia of culture and evolution have somehow left us defective as human beings, and it's only dumb luck we survived this long. Just like modern dietary recommendations have created the food-related problems we're now trying to solve, it turns out that modern running shoes have created modern running injuries. I'll stick to my $25 flat canvas Airwalks.