Unfortunately, I got some very bad news tonight. My bosses had an emergency dropped in their lap this week: roughly 30 students, or about 1/3rd of the school, suddenly and mysteriously quit the school for unknown reasons. They're desperately scrambling to figure out why, but in the meantime they're going to have to take over teaching many of the classes themselves to salvage things until the start of the school year in March. The result is that they had to let me and another coworker go, effective today.
They feel absolutely terrible about it, and they're going to do everything they can to get us new jobs. They assured us that it had nothing to do with our performance, and that they fully intended to have us stay another year before this happened. We'll be able to stay in our apartments for as long as we need to, and we'll be paid for December and January. This weekend they'll be writing glowing letters explaining the situation that we can send to prospective employers, and they're going to call some recruiters that they trust to get us started on the job hunt. They also said that, if we were available in March, they'd like to have us come back, though obviously the way things are now they couldn't guarantee anything.
It was quite a surprise to hear this, though I'm honestly doing okay. I'd had a feeling that I might not have a second year at Baron's, so I got over all the stress of that possibility before Christmas. I certainly wasn't expecting to lose my job today, and it sucks, but that's life. I'm very grateful for the Buddhist philosophy I've been learning at Hwagyesa Temple in Seoul because it helped me realize (before this happened) that I was afraid of losing this job because I was attached to the school and the people there. Recognizing that allowed me to mentally prepare for the possibility of change, so while I am sad, I'm not freaking out like I probably would have a year earlier. Everyone I've talked to about it so far has been shocked that I'm taking this so well!
I'll definitely miss the school and all (well, most) of the kids, but I had a good ten months with them and I feel like I ended things on a good note. It's also an opportunity to find work in Seoul and be closer to all my excellent friends there, and I can devote more time to my writing (which I've done precious little of since finishing my second screenplay) while I'm on the job hunt. Who knows, maybe things will turn around here as suddenly as they went bad and I'll go back to Baron's in a couple months. I'm going to stay in Korea, and I have no doubts about my ability to find employment soon. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty in my life for the foreseeable future, but I'm doing okay and I'm confident that everything with turn out alright :)
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