Month: July 2012

There is a schadenfreude in what's been happening. When I left LBridge in 2009, it was with mixed emotions. One thing I felt was certain was that that company was in something of a downward spiral due to mismanagement.

And so… to be working for Karma, 3 years later, and have Karma take over the dregs of that LBridge business, now re-named as Woongjin but barely 6 months ago… well, one wants to mutter "I told you so."

There is some familiarity, too. Some things aren't that different from LBridge – including several staff members that I knew from back then, still around, and a PC on a colleague's desk that is exactly the PC I had on my desk at LBridge – I know because there are stickers there that are too distinctive to have been coincidentally placed by someone else. Although LBridge had rebranded as Woongjin recently, a lot of the internals still bear the familiar LBridge logo.

I don't feel a lot of confidence, right now, that this will go exceptionally smoothly. There are so many uncertainties, and I suspect (although I don't know for certain) that there are some major financial risks involved, too, that are utterly beyond my control. Such is the churn of the Korean hagwon market, though. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. When Curt asked me how I was doing, yesterday, as if worried about the classes, I said I liked inheriting Woongjin's (LBridge's) rigid curriculum, and looked forward to making it work for the Karma kids.

Here's a picture of the Woongjin building, with new "Karma Plus" signage attached (hard to see well because of the trees, the Karma sign is yellow, at the top of the building on the left: 카르마). This is LBridge's former Hugok Middle-school campus, which is across the street from the former elementary campus where I worked in 2008-2009 (long ago closed down). So I took the photo this morning standing at the entry of my former work place.

Welcome to yesterday. Life repeats, recycles, with renewal. Karma.

Scene 1 from day 2 of The Merger.

Under the new schedule, I've been required to give up my little-ones – the first and second graders in my Phonics classes. Those kids are so difficult to teach, but I truly love them, too. Today, after their class was finishing with their new teacher, I saw little Yedam in the hall. A tiny girl, very cute, charming personality, but amazingly difficult to teach, as she has so far utterly failed to wrap her mind around the concept of "chair." (She doesn't know how to sit down.)

"예담아," I motioned for her to come over to where I was coming out of another classroom. "Clark-셈, 어떼요?" She had been panicked earlier, at the idea of changing teachers. She is the girl who used to cry whenever we had a vocabulary quiz. I expected the worst.

But she surprised me. She smiled shyly and held up forefinger joined to thumb, in the "OK" sign. "응… 좋아. Bye teacher." She ran away down the stairs. I felt happy and relieved.

Scene 2 from day 2 of The Merger.

We were sitting around in the cramped, over-crowded, not yet properly configured staff room. The middle schooler teachers mostly off doing the test-prep stuff, we mostly elementary teachers not having much to do, but Curt had had a tantrum yesterday about teachers leaving earlier than 10 pm when things still weren't settled (10 pm is the official end time).

It's weird, for me, because all of a sudden I have a bunch of colleagues who are fluent English speakers – Karma only had me and Grace, and Grace was part-time, but now there's a group of 4 of us. Frank was reading something online about a zombie attack (a la the recent weird news from Miami), but now in China. Differentiated, apparently, by the fact that this zombie attack in China didn't involve drugs, as the Miami event had. Some guy had tried to eat the face of some other guy. Ken said something about oh, how strange, there's maybe a real zombie virus out there. But then Frank said, very funny, "Yeah, but those Chinese, they will eat anything."

Um. Get it? I thought it was funny at the time.

Scene 3 from day 2 of The Merger.

Actually, a scene unrelated to The Merger. I was walking home. I saw one of those motorcycles that looks like a prop from a Mad Max movie – beaten up and dirty, and saddlebags and boxes duct taped onto the back in a big pile, some guy who looks like he lives on his motorcycle, with a cool windshield-type-contraption on the front, made out of plastic and duct tape and cardboard (and how does he see through it?). The man wearing a bandana and no helmet. He looked like post-apocalyptic Korean pirate. But his motorcyle had a GPS taped onto the handlebars. And he was talking on an iPhone. And running a red light. This is Korea.

[Daily log: walking, 4 km]