Lesson 41

Safety does not appear to be a primary concern at Maple Bear Yeongtong.

When I walked into my classroom this morning I was surprised to find that the carpet was missing. It's pretty much the focal point of the room, and the main tool for keeping the kids organized and disciplined. Its absence means that the kids don't know where to sit, or what to do when I start counting down from 10, expecting them to be sitting quietly and attentively waiting to hear what we're doing next. Now they just kind of stand/sit awkwardly in a cluster and I have to reorganize them every time.

So the carpet was missing and I thought that, perhaps, it was finally getting the professional cleaning it has been needing for so long.

When Sally pointed to a huge brown spot on the ceiling and said, "Missuh Cally, this what?" I finally understood the disappearance of the carpet: my classroom had flooded. I looked at the rest of the ceiling. Directly above the table where the kids do most of their work, the ceiling looked like it was going to fall in. All along the edges of the ceiling there were brown water marks. There were more water marks surrounding several of the light fixtures. One light was broken. I gave the kids a math worksheet and promptly went downstairs to tell Julia.

She came and inspected it, looked a little surprised, talked to Jay (the guy who seems to fix everything in the school), then came back and told me it was nothing to worry about. I tell her, "There is still water pooling in my ceiling. I don't want anything crashing down into my classroom. That's dangerous." She tells me the leak from upstairs stopped and that the ceiling won't collapse. I stand on a chair, in front of my students, and touch the brown spot on the ceiling that Sally first noticed. "Feel this, Julia. There is water in here. The leak has not stopped." She brought Jay in. Jay merely looked at it, said something in Korean, and left. Julia tells me to not worry.

For the rest of the day they were jackhammering directly above my classroom.

Sally kept singing the Swimming Pool song because she thought our classroom was going to flood. Rachel, from my afternoon class, refused to sit at the big table because she thought the ceiling was going to fall in. Eric, also from my afternoon class, kept remarking on the commotion upstairs. He would imitate a jackhammer, make a surprised face, then mimic an explosion and say, "Class go boom!" Then he would chuckle.

Glad to see my kids have a sense of humor about this whole situation.