It's a whole new year.

Today was the opening of the new year for Korean schools, which means changes at The Hagwon too. We have a new crop of baby first graders coming in, which means everybody else is shuffled and pushed up an hour. Reshuffling of the afternoon teachers, too: one teacher got transferred out and another brought it; all of my wonderful classes were taken away from me and given to the disciplinarian teacher, who really should be doing, oh I don't know, the classes with discipline problems. But that'd make too much sense for The Hagwon! In fact, in a stunning piece of reasoning, The Director is pointedly not giving the bad classes to Disciplinarian because if the boys can't spend English Hagwon time playing with their friends, they might quit.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head and get on with it.

So, my new and vastly unimproved schedule:

2pm - first grade, mid-level. I had half of them in kindergarten. They're solid students and mostly good kids. I won't have any trouble with them; also, there's only six.
3pm - kill me. Rotating class (so, a different group MWF than TR), low level, no interest.
4pm - no, seriously. Big rotating class, equally low, much worse discipline-wise.
5pm - low level underacheivers, but small class size and only on MWF. I can do a little with these guys, anyway.
6pm - thank the hockey gods for this one. Our six smartest elementary kids in one room. I've got my 4th grade writing genius (more on her at a later date), two 4th graders who lived in the US for two years, a very talented 5th grader and one of the funniest kids I know, even if he is a bit behind the others and in 6th grade (he's the "daughter of a bitch" boy).

Aside from losing all my kids that I've had since I started at this damn place, the big downsides are that I'm no longer teaching my 8-year-old math genius and my favorite first grader won't be with me anymore, either.

This whole thing would be so much easier if I didn't care about my job or my kids.

On a high note, I got to name a couple kids today. One was "Weasley" already, but I tagged two more "McKay" and "Carson." Cookies for whoever gets the reference.