First of all, our former Head Instructor quit before the end of her contract. According to the terms of our contracts with the company you're supposed to give as much as 8 weeks notice of this so that they have time to find a new teacher, get them processed through the litany of paperwork involved in moving here, fly them over, train them and move them down. She informed me she would be quitting about...let's be generous and say 30 hours in advance, and that I would most likely be taking over as Head Instructor. So go me! Battlefield promotions worked out really well in Starship Troopers, so at this point I'm optimistic in a "brick to the face" sort of way.
To cut a tediously long story short, it all worked out in the end. I mean aside from the lack of sleep and the stress headaches and the constant punch spasms. The last few weeks have actually been really fun, and it's been nice getting to know our new staff members. One of them is actually from Canada, if you can believe such a ridiculous thing. Whoever heard of someone from Canada? Now that everyone has more or less settled in it's back to the ordinary swing of things. I'm enjoying a really bizarre mixed schedule this term where I spend half my time in the April branch, which involves teaching much younger kids a more simplified curriculum. It's been a riot so far, because kids at a certain age are really damn weird.
One of the boys in my Tuesday/Thursday class is constantly quoting stuff from Wrestlemania. It's hard to even explain how odd this is. Wrestling isn't really a thing here, so for him to be extremely familiar with an English-based show about wrestling is odd in and of itself. And it's astonishing how much he knows. He's familiar with wrestlers who died before even I was born and I have no idea where he's picking it up from. There might honestly be a satellite dish in his brain and he's just projecting everything he picks up verbatim without really understanding it, but I mean, that hardly ever happens.
There's another girl, probably about six or seven years old, who has seemingly decided that I am a problem and need to die. I don't even teach her, but I did wave at her once while sitting in the foyer during break. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me, unblinking, for three straight minutes. Nothing I said or did made any impact on her from that moment. She didn't look angry, or scared, or even confused. No expression whatsoever. At one point I turned to my co-worker and said, "This is the most terrifying moment of my whole life," and I meant it.
So that's life here so far. I would apologize for the lack of updates but I'm probably the only person still reading this and I don't really give a fuck what I think. Things are going great, the weather is getting warmer and I'm gonna be travelling to the Philippines during my vacation week in April. Actually I don't think I have a single free weekend until at least next month, which is still hard to get used to. I had virtually no social life this time last year and now I have more social life than I can physically process.
Korea, man. It's a fun place to be.
Today's title:
There's another girl, probably about six or seven years old, who has seemingly decided that I am a problem and need to die. I don't even teach her, but I did wave at her once while sitting in the foyer during break. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me, unblinking, for three straight minutes. Nothing I said or did made any impact on her from that moment. She didn't look angry, or scared, or even confused. No expression whatsoever. At one point I turned to my co-worker and said, "This is the most terrifying moment of my whole life," and I meant it.
So that's life here so far. I would apologize for the lack of updates but I'm probably the only person still reading this and I don't really give a fuck what I think. Things are going great, the weather is getting warmer and I'm gonna be travelling to the Philippines during my vacation week in April. Actually I don't think I have a single free weekend until at least next month, which is still hard to get used to. I had virtually no social life this time last year and now I have more social life than I can physically process.
Korea, man. It's a fun place to be.
Today's title:
