Girls were darrrrling. In 2nd grade, Minji prides herself on being the only Justin Bieber fan at her school. The other girls like K-pop bands, so she feels very dedicated and counter-cultural for liking a pretty Canadian boy who sings instead of a pretty Korean boy who sings. Minji has the best English of all the girls, and she likes telling me about her school life.
Naturally, Her Haiku and Art Were About Justin.
And Suyeon's just insanely good at art--she let me keep the artwork she did last week, and now it's tacked up in my office. This is what she made this week:
Pencil and Pastels and Awesomeness.
One of the first-grade girls whose name I don't know wrote a very pretty poem about love:
"Love is a red heart.
Love is like a medicine.
Love that makes you tall."
GOODNESS. She's got this poetry thing nailed.
Another 1st-grade girl wrote this heartbreaking piece about studying:
"The Study Machine.
They are student, that means I'm
a Student Machine."
The boys' stuff wasn't as amazing, mainly because they didn't feel like trying much. Which was fine, since they were happy and we had good conversations and they at least had the concept of haiku.
Daehoonie slept for the first 20 minutes of class--poor baby must have been quite tired. But he soon rallied and wrote a good haiku about his favorite ice cream. I told him today that he has a wonderful smile, which is so very true. That's why his apellation in my head is "Sparkly Daehoon"--he always glows a bit.
Got to talk tons with HH, who gave a presentation of some sort earlier today. And the presentation was an application to get into...somewhere. A camp or a club or a scholarship or something. He didn't explain because he was distracted with trying to fix my unfixable school computer.
He asked me if his haiku (which he wrote in 30 seconds and which was honestly pretty lame) was good and I waited a beat before saying "Yes, it's good." He said, "Lie," like he was disappointed that I didn't think his non-effort was amazing. But good things happened for him later when he begged his way to getting extra cookies by telling me his favorite color (which is still in constant flux), and he also extended the 2nd-graders game of spoons by requesting that we play just a liiiiitle longer.
Tried to get a picture of Jiwoong, who didn't even attempt to write or draw, of course. He moved, so I only got a picture of his shirt but then he came up to ask me, "Delete the photo. I don't like pictures. I hate taking pictures. Delete the photo." He was saying it nicely and I showed him that I'd only got a picture of his shirt, but he still wanted it gone. Poor Jiwoong. I wonder if this photo aversion is because the other boys tease him about being ugly. I think it must be.
Also, when I walked over to give Jiwoong his paper, I exclaimed "Jiwoong, I missed you!" because we haven't had afterschool together this week. I expected him to grumble or roll his eyes, but he blushed, ducked his head, and smiled. I said, "I saw your smile! I saw it!" Boy doesn't hate me after all.
With my 1st-grade class, I let Saturday-Jeongmin play videos on my computer the whole time while I worked with the other kids. He doesn't have friends in the class, he didn't feel like doing the same work again, and he needed to do something that made him feel special. He walked me to the bus stop again when we were done, and he told me there were no lights on the street that leads toward his house, but fortunately it wasn't getting dark yet.
During break, I played spoon-cards with the 1st-grade troublemaker boys and we had the time! This week, they were already trying harder to write good haiku, and they kept sweetly asking for help, "Teacher, teacher, teacher..." It was so doggone cute, coming from these boys who couldn't care less about anything during week one.
Hyungro was precious. For some reason, I had though he was the toughest kid in the bunch, but's he's got a very soft side. Yejae has an angelically beautiful face, Jeongwan is a good writer and doesn't go to our school, and Jaewon is as tall as a third-grader. They went nuts over the spoons game and kept asking for "one more, teacher, one more!" And then they changed the definition of 'one': "Play three "one more" please." We played for forever and joked a lot, and it was a good day for everyone, all told.
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