Once upon a time, I was your son-seng nim. :)

Six years. It had been six long years.


When I was at the age when people started asking what I would like to be when I grew up, my response was a simple, “I want to be a teacher”.  I wanted to be a teacher for no specific reason. I couldn’t even remember if I had a reason at all.  Since I was an only child, I remembered playing with my dolls – I was the teacher and my dolls were my students. I had a blackboard, a box of chalks, a blackboard eraser…and oh, I even had a teacher’s record book! 


As I grew older, my plans and dreams changed. I took up Tourism because I wanted to be a flight stewardess. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy landing on such a job. Right after graduation in 2005, I was so eager to find a job so I sent resumes to a lot of companies right away. No calls. Until I felt desperate so I went to this employment agency in Kamias, Quezon City. The position I was applying for was an encoder at a bank. During the interview, the interviewer said I could speak English quite well so she’d like to endorse me to a Korean company which was located in that same building. So I went there, had my interview…


And just like what they always say, the rest was history. 


I’d say the job I had for six years realized my childhood dream – teaching. But who would have thought I’d love that? And loved teaching English to Koreans, for that matter? In my six years of working in this industry, I’d met different types of people – people from various walks of life, ages, personality, economic status, etc. Some of them became my very good friends, some just came and went. Some made my everyday life miserable and made me hate my job, but surprisingly, most of these students were the ones I had a hard time saying goodbye to. In short, the people I talked to, laughed with, corrected and taught, and sometimes shouted at, left a special place in my heart – something that would always remind me that once upon a time, I was called a teacher.


I must admit, it has just been almost 2 months since I last talked to my Korean students. And I miss the job. I miss doing the things that I had been doing for the last six years. I miss the fun when my students and I played tic-tac-toe. I miss asking how their days were. I miss asking what they had for dinner, what they’d do on the weekends, what movie they’d watch and what a certain idiom meant. These were just the almost everyday questions I asked them. Almost every day that I felt sick of asking these questions. But how I miss them now! 


I think there is a fine line between letting go of the things that a person is used to doing/having and letting go of the things that a person is used to doing/having BY HEART. The latter is way harder.


I may not had been a teacher by profession. 
I may not have had the proper training.
I may not have had the license to do it. 
But I knew I had the most important thing…
I had the heart.