Yuki's Haven: Second Quarter at NGLOWKids

Two Quarters have officially passed. Moving forward with Nglow we went through so many crazy last minute changes and it's been driving me nuts...but.

I am not sure I dislike changes. It's crazy and stressful as hell, mind you. I have skipped 3 months period and I am totally blaming Nglow for that (though, it's good not to be crazy moody for three months, eh?) Thing is, I have never been a person that loves routine. I am full of messed up dilemmas: I am a bit of a control freak, so I NEED to know what is going on, because it's everything or nothing. It's either I keep EVERYTHING in control, or I let everything go completely wild and make myself comfortable in my mess and watch the world burn around me without any trace of remorse. Trust me, you prefer me as a control freak.

On the other hand, if I were to be in control of everything all the time, nothing would change, and it would end up being the weirdest boring piece of routine life ever. I don't think I would like that. I need stuff that crashes into my life to make it all weirded out, in order for me to find some sort of balance. In this regard, Nglow has been good to me.

We started with the really badly managed merge with the school upstairs (resulting in having too many kids for the number of teachers, two directors and two secretaries, amongst other things). It kept going crazy for a month, before I finally started to like my kids (who were screaming running and I-do-what-I-want-when-I-want little monsters in my eyes for the longest time). Then we got teachers leaving, Korean helpers leaving, new ones coming, that we had to fire cuz they were nutcases.

One of the foreign teacher left (had planned on leaving the school that merged with ours before the merge so that one was not a surprise) and was replaced with a sweetheart that used to work in chungwon (correct me if the name is messed up). She's from Montreal and speaks French. We've been rummaging all the coffee shops in Dongtan lately, making jokes as if we're on dates every night after work. Anyways. Then, some kids joined, and some left. Two of them, were kids I loved: 5 years old class's Daniel and 6 years old class's Chloe. I will miss those kids so much. I am so sad :(

The new teacher ( from here on "N Teacher") had only been here for a week when hell broke loose in the Hagwon. The big boss opened a new branch in Yeosu and didn't have money to pay us in time so we got only 50% of our paychecks, 5 days late and the rest only 4 days later. All the teacher were pissed. So was I. I had been sticking to the school out of loyalty, because I believed that many things that happened were out of anyone's control, and believed that loyalty brought loyalty back. Not getting paid because of a bad decision of bad management of my boss's part, I felt that as a kind of treason. Maybe I'm too much?

Anyways, everyone was coming back from their vacation, broke, as any vacation is bound to have people spend a lot of money, and we didn't even got our money one time. Man I was so pissed (PMSing was not helping at the time, to be completely fair). I left the school as soon as I was done with my classes and my prep for the next day instead of staying til 6 as my contract said: if they were not keeping their end of the contract by not paying me on time, I would not exert myself finding new ideas of stuff to do when I was working for free anyways. That lasted a short time, fortunately. It's not like I had anything to do after school, with no money, I basically just went home after school and slept early. I just felt angry at my life. I refused to make my kids pay for that however, the kids had nothing to do with this. It would've been unfair that they'd pay for that. There was no way I was not going to show up at work.

We went past that point anyways, there were promises made that this was not going to happen again, written promised, spoken promises. I am willing to believe them one more time. I do it for the kids, I tell myself. But I also do it for myself, because I like the place somehow. NGlow is a home for me now. For how long, I don't know. But for now, at least, it is.

We went from 4 managers to 2, then one quit. Last week my boss was at the school the whole week. It felt like he finally put his heart into setting things right. He brought staff from the main branch, and they seem to know exactly what they are doing. Management wise and human resources wise. I think NGlow has gone as low as can possibly be, and feel the breeze going up. We'll be fine.

Last week we had to write our quarterly reports on each of our kids so I took a lot of pictures with my kids. Lately I'd been busy with everything else so I did not take many pictures, but this week was picture week. I am still amazed at my kids. They are the lowest of all the 7 years old of the school. I have the trouble class. One of the main reason is that the English level gap between all those kids is to huge that it's hard to get them on the same page. Especially with nine kids. Eight of my kids were in the school for more than 6 months before I got them, but the ninth kid got there a week after the merge. He did not know a word on English. He was tearing up every 2 seconds because he could make nothing of what was going on in the class. After getting used to coming to school, he got really good really quickly. I can't be that good of a teacher, so I can only say one thing: this kid is really clever. And he has a lot of positive energy that he brings to our classroom.

On the second week of August we had a water fun day on the same rooftop as the day we had our Children Day event. Lot of refreshing water on a super hot summer day. Nowadays I forget how hot the summer was, as the day is just hot and nights are slowly getting chillier.

Summer in Korea is a sweet lot of hotness and beautiful sunshine.

My new kid. En petit chien mouillé.

Stormy's 6 years old's David the living sunshine. I have rarely seen a kid always happy, and respectful of people around him. He is so sweet and well-behaved. Setting the example in Stormy's classroom. He is also in my after school, along with 3 other kids of her class (Chloe used to be there too :( ).