Always with the procrastination

Well I should have made a post at the end of February, but I got lazy and figured I wouldn't miss the month since I had already made a post at the beginning of that month. Now that I'm sitting around trying to do some work, I am able to finally make a post because it counts as procrastination from doing something important! February was a pretty busy month. I came back from Washington, went back to work, watched students graduate, got my visa and stuff taken care of, then went back to Washington again, then came back to work.

Ok post done, we can go home now!

No, I'm not letting you off that easy.

That "graduation week" that I had to make it back for turned out to be pretty unimportant. I had a few options for class: Mafia (game), Taboo (game), Back to the Future, or self study. All of the first graders chose the movie and all of the second graders chose....self study. So the whole week was pretty uneventful. Graduation was nice, I'm going to miss the students that graduated. I only knew really 9 of them in a graduating class of 201 (because I had a class of 7 then gave 2 more some private tutoring for interviews over the summer), so I can only imagine how graduation will be next year when I know about 120 of the graduating students (and that class will contain my favorite students from last year).

The week after that was spent mostly desk warming. Or it would have been, but our office head offered us a different deal. For those of us renewing our contracts, we are given 15 days of paid vacation that we have to use consecutively (and weekends count once you start the 15 days, so it's actually more like 11 which is still a pretty good deal). They would rather we not use the days in summer because we only have about 2 weeks when we could use vacation time in the summer anyway. If we took that route, then we would have our full contract-mandated 4 weeks of paid vacation next winter and they don't want that, so the offer was made to me to use my 15 days +1 (I'm allowed 1-3 "grievance days" for different family members) to go back home for more than just a weekend. This was much appreciated for me because I was then able to spend a full week at home helping clean Grandpa's apartment and help prepare for the funeral rather than just flying in on a Friday night and flying back out on that Sunday night right after the funeral. I also had a week of vacation in that 15 days that I was spending being in Korea. I would have gone home, but I had some paperwork (visa and stuff) to sort out before going home so I took my week to just do that.

Going home again was pretty decent. I found a better way to book plane tickets and got good fares, so the plane rides were nicer. I had bulkhead rows on my flights to and from Frisco and I had exit rows on my flights between Frisco and Seattle, so I always had a little bit of extra legroom. It lessened the pain of making a round trip to Washington so soon after my last one.

When I was at home, I generally just spent time working on Grandpa's apartment, organizing things, and hanging out around the house. I did get to see everyone once or twice which was nice too. I enjoyed the game night we got in and the good drunk viewings of Ktown season 2 as well as the GoT watching.

Grandpa's funeral was pretty well done. A lot of people showed up and there were some people I hadn't seen in a while and would have not seen had I not come back for this. I didn't do any readings for this funeral unlike the one I did for my Grandma (his wife) back in 2006, but dad did remember Grandpa always used to say he wanted me to play taps for his funeral and asked me if I'd do it. I did it and it went well despite not having played a brass instrument in about 5 years. I don't want to have to play taps many more times though, so I think I'll just never make the offer again, but I'll always be okay doing it if someone specifically requests it. I had no problem doing it for Grandpa, but it was just extremely sad.

After getting back to Korea, we spent a couple of days cleaning the office and getting our new assignments. This year, I'm teaching only first graders (10th graders) and my new partner is Brandon, the guy I hang out with all the time. Patrick and the new guy (Richard) are teaching 2nd graders (11th graders). I was bummed about losing all of my former students this year, but I still get to see them and now they can like me more because I'm not the one giving them schoolwork.

I'll talk about my classes more next post. We've only had one week of them and we also got our schedule changed up this next week so I'm not even used to that. Until next time, peace out.