Well, it wasn’t really much of a deluge, as deluges go.
There have been some men working on digging up a sidewalk outside of the hallway outside of my classroom, the last few days. I guess they made a mistake, and piled some dirt in a ditch that was important for draining something. The consequence was that water started oozing into the hallway, making a flood.
My 6th grader, Rachel, came into the classroom toward the end of the lunch hour, and said, “Teacher! You must come the hallway. Now! See this!”
I poked my head out into the hall, and saw the flood. But what was really interesting to me was the way that there was a group of students cleaning it up – with no adult supervision. 5th and 6th graders, fetching mops, and moving the water down the hallway and splashing it out the door. They were not working very efficiently, but the fact they had taken the initiative to do this only serves as another confirmation to my speculations yesterday about how Korean culture still has deeply embedded memes about preparing for and coping with an unknowable future.
Maybe that’s too deep. The flood wasn’t that deep. Here’s a picture of the kids with mops, tackling the flood.
It was a day of minor crises. In my afterschool class for the first graders, a new enrollee punched another kid in the nose while my back was turned. I got to experience that inevitable moment, that every elementary teacher gets to experience at least once, of being bled upon profusely by a wailing child. This was not the first time, for me. And interestingly, the whole thing didn’t really phase me.
It’s weird how when the adults around me do stupid shit, I get furious – I’m thinking of my current mess involving my housing. But when kids around me do stupid shit, I just smile and say, “it’ll be OK.” I guess that’s a good thing.
I carried the child to the nurse’s office, down the hall, and she installed some cotton in his nostrils. I separated the two boys involved, and was hopefully appropriately stern – I suspect the new kid had punched the other because the other had been teasing him for being the new kid. So I assume both were at fault.
Anyway – I have a ruined shirt, with bloodstains. I hope my necktie can be saved – I like the one I was wearing (it’s the one I bought in Germany, showing a map of Leipzig, in silk – the kids think it’s cool: “oh, necktie map!”).
