Two sixth-grade boys ran past me in the courtyard. “Teacher! Teacher! African! Snowball!” they panted out, excitedly. But they didn’t slow down. They quickly disappeared into the back wing, toward the stairwell leading to the sixth-grade classrooms.
This was hard for me to understand. I was puzzled.
Until, a few moments later, Hwa-myeong raced into view from the alleyway between the storage building and the entrance to the boy’s bathroom. Ah. Hwa-myeong – our school’s only “ethnically diverse” Korean. He’s Afro-Korean, or something Middle-Eastern, in his background. He’s a nice kid – a little bit hyper, but well-adjusted and quite popular. But his nickname, of course, seems to be “African” (the English word, “a-peu-ri-kan” in the Koreanized rendering). He had a large snowball. He was on the hunt. I got him to pause long enough so I could take his picture, as he posed, proudly displaying his weaponized snow.
Here are some other pictures of our first snow.
The weather was Minnesota-y, today. Meaning not the cold, per se, but the strangeness. It was quite changeable. Morning it was bitterly cold and snowing. By noon, the snow had melted and it was blustery. At 3 pm, the sky was like the bottom of a copper kettle, and there was thunder and lightning. There was a brief downpour of cold, cold rain. When I was walking home from the bus terminal at 6 pm, the sky was cloudless and violet-pink-blue-gold, from the dregs of the disappearing sun, and there was a sliver of crescent moon hanging peacefully.
My favorite first-grader, Ha-neul, presented me with a portrait she’d created of me, today. I was very pleased.
