Over the past several months, I’ve been doing my best to inform my newly arrived Dominican Republic student about the winter weather in Ohio. I’m not exactly sure why, but I have this fascination with students who haven’t seen snow. It’s not that I’m a huge fan, but since it’s been present my entire life, I find it extremely intriguing when students move to Ohio but have never seen it. While it’s not Buffalo, I usually can’t wait to see their reaction.
Because my student and I have been talking about the upcoming snow experience and after I woke up yesterday and got to work, the first thing I started thinking about was the next time I got to hear about the first snow story. Usually, I’m interested, but this has been building up for months. Since she started, she’s told me that she might not come to class in January because of the cold, that she might have to get a divorce and move back to her country, and that if class ever got cancelled I had to call her and tel her, so she didn’t unnecessarily ride the bus.
Unsurprisingly, when I saw her in class this morning, I expected the worst. Actually, I half didn’t expect her to be there. When she waddled into the room, in more clothes than I expect that she ever wore in her life, she sat down and had this huge smile on my face. I expected frustration or disappointment for the horrendously frigid bus-sicle ride I made her take today because of class, but a smile.
In my English classes, I always start my lessons by asking my students, “What’s new?” (It’s amazing how, even though they might not know how to learn a word of English, in about a week they all know how to respond, “Nothing.”) Not willingly to wait, I asked my student, and immediately, she started laughing.
She explained that she work up at 8:30 because the sunlight reflecting off the snow, threw open the curtains, and that all the curtains in her house stayed open for the rest of the day. She called another student from class to bring her kids so she could play with them in the snow. She took picture upon picture to send to her family. And for some reason–I haven’t quite figured this one out yet except that a cousin in the Dominican Republic told her to–she covered her face in the snow and washed her face with it. Now, that’s just weird, but I couldn’t stop laughing. She said that she was running around and playing in the snow that her neighbors probably thought that she had lost it.
While it’s comical, I love having the opportunity to share these experiences with my students. While this story has now gone to the top of my list, it is only slightly eclipsed by one of my pasts students description about when she first had to use a Western toilet…but that’s probably a different story for a different day.
Kolter
