The Korean school calendar works very differently from in North America. Sometime around the start of March, each year, the “school year” starts. Kids move up a grade. Teachers start or stop contracts or migrate schools (except for us wacky foreigners). Moms (and even a few progressive dads) show up and take videos of little Iseul’s first day of school, as the kids nervously stand around in lines and formations meeting their teachers and listening to interminable speeches by authority figures.
It’s quite charming, in its Korean way. And having resolved that I’ll be moving on in two more months, I got very sappy and nostalgic watching all my much-loved first-graders becoming proud and yet strangely equally rambunctious second graders, and all my kind-hearted third-graders becoming world-weary and yet equally friendly fourth graders.
Here is a picture of the gym, as the kids did some high-grade waiting. They’re in rows, front to back, by class. Second-graders in foreground, with sixth-graders farthest away. Teachers standing facing at the heads of the lines.
Lot’s of changes. New teachers. Some older teachers, gone. There is never much forewarning of these things – no one tells the foreigners much of what is going on.
We have new English department co-teachers. Ms Lee is gone – some kind of sabbatical, related to her planning to take a big test to become a qualified highschool level teacher next fall. And Ms Ryu, the English “department head” (such as it is) whom I like so much… she’s not gone, but she’s no longer in charge of the English department. Adjustments forthcoming.
Leaving school, I met Hae-rim’s brother (whose name I always forget, because he insists his name is “crazy monkey boy”). He had a large box in front of the stationery store at the school’s main gate. He opened the box. Hae-rim was inside.
A passing random foreigner (yes, really, in Hongnong! – well, actually, it was just Glenn, the idiosyncratic Canadian who works at the middle school across the street) took our picture. Hae-rim, Jared, Crazy Monkey Boy. These are the kids I will remember very, very much, when I leave Hongnong.
