School's in Session
Yali and I walked into the Secretary of State downtown shortly after nine o’clock that morning. Post Adoption Report 3 of 4 was almost completed. Five minutes later it was returned with a gold seal, ready for shipping to Colombia. Almost done. Just six months to go.
“Yali! Yali, pay attention!”
Heidi stood at the front of the room near the white board, dry erase marker in hand. She had already written out a full addition problem for Yali to memorize, and was becoming mildly frustrated with her pupil for not keeping his eyes glued to the board.
“Now,” she ordered, “repeat after me. One.”
She held up one finger. So did Yali.
“Plus…”
“Plus!” he repeated.
“Two…”
Yali strained to hold up two fingers instead of three, and was successful.
And so forth. At the end of his lesson, Heidi gave him a high five.
“Good job, Yali!”
Then she made the apparent mistake of moving on to subtraction. Because by this time, Yali had had enough, and slowly slid off his chair onto the floor like a pancake.
“Okay, Yali. Okay. Give me your snacks now. If you can’t do your lesson, you can’t have your snacks.”
Yali was clearly unbothered by this threat.
“Okay, Yali, we have to go have a talk in the hallway.”
So while Heidi escorted her disobedient charge from the room for some disciplinary interaction, Annie-Bea took over the classroom, using a small flag pole from Hans’ room as a pointer stick. She scrawled several patches of dry erase marker on the board in various colors.
“Now,” she turned to an unsuspecting Puck sprawled in a chair in front of her, “I’m going to teach you your colors.”
Puck’s jaw dropped a little. “What? Are you serious? I already know my colors.”
“You have to learn your colors,” she insisted. “Tell me what these colors are.”
Puck couldn’t believe it. “Blue, purple…”
“No, no, NO!” Annie-Bea soundly chastised him, clapping the flag pole against the board. “LIGHT blue and VIOLET!”
Puck just looked dumbfounded and went back to his cardboard – a safe haven in a world of baffling girls.