So as I’ve been temporarily reviving this blog from the dead, I’ve been going through old unfinished draft posts (of which there were many) and deleting them. But a few were kind of okay, the bare bones of what could’ve been a decent entry. So, as a way to stretch my blog content out before it fizzles and dies again (ha), I’m going to revive these little snippets as their own posts with added context from my perspective in 2024.
First let’s reach wayyyyy back to this draft from almost 7(!) years ago:
Feb 7, 2017 – “Graduation and growing up”
My 3rd years graduated from middle school today. They’re 16 years old and they’ll start high school in less than a month.
At 10:30 I shivered my way down to the auditorium/gym for the ceremony. There were brief speeches from the principal and people I assume work at the Office of Education, maybe superintendents or something. A few exemplary students were recognized.
Every class (we only have six 3rd grade classes at my school, of around 24 students each) had to make a “UCC”, which I believe is Konglish because I’ve never heard it used in America but I really have no sense of these things anymore. Anyway it means “user-created content” and in Korea it specifically means videos, usually put together by students for contests or festivals.
Fittingly, the quality of the videos reflected the general effort and attitude I typically see from each class (i.e. the evil class put approximately 1.5 seconds of thought into their video and it showed, which gave me a very unteacherly schadenfreude-like satisfaction). The rest were pretty cute though.
Then the students sang this song, “Now It’s Goodbye,”* which is kind of a classic sad goodbye song that pretty much all Koreans know. Towards the end they turned the music down and the kids were just singing a cappella. There were tears. Even some of the goofiest and toughest boys were getting emotional.
*Artist: 015B; original title: “이젠 안녕” (1991)
Context: Re-listening to the song I linked brings back memories for sure. I really miss teaching sometimes (but I don’t miss that evil class… still remember them vividly, might have PTSD). Here are the song’s translated lyrics, which might lend insight into why it brought forth tears – very apropos for a school graduation, I think:
In that awkward expression when we first met
It was difficult to talk to each other, so we hesitated, but
The countless days spent buried in music
It’s a shame I can’t go back now
Now it’s time for us to leave each other
I turn away with regret, but
Time will bring us back together
It’s a shame, but we’ll wait until then
One cold winter day, we gathered in a small room
Now that song I used to sing
It was a small song buried in my memory, but
In our hearts forever
Goodbye is not an eternal separation
It must be a promise to meet again
The time we spent together is now a memory
We have to find our own path and leave.
It’s especially nostalgic because graduation ceremonies got nixed when Covid started and still hadn’t made a comeback by the time I left teaching in mid 2022 – the kids would stay in their individual homerooms and just watch the principal’s speech and other closing ceremony type things on their classroom TVs. So it’s been a long time since I witnessed the camaraderie and the bittersweet end of a school year like that.
I hope they’ve gone back to doing whole-school graduation ceremonies by now. It’s so meaningful for the students, and sometimes we all need to be together and sing together and cry together.
Introvert in Korea 