The Many Faces of Liz

Everybody, this is Liz. If you have looked at any of my pictures, you may recognize her. She is one of my K kids and is also the daughter of my school's accountant. She also may be the slowest girl in the class or possibly the history of Kids College; thankfully, her mom knows that and supposedly apologized to her last teacher for her daughter being so dumb. Ive wanted to write about Liz for some time, but I wanted to make sure that I had pictures that accurately showed her emotions. Also, I am comfortable writing about Liz because it is not a secret that she is slow, along with her Mom, the majority of the teachers I work with know that when she hears "Liz, Liz, LIZ!," she often has to be reminded that they are talking to her. I have a desk right by her mom and at least twice a week, she walks right by us in the morning while we both say "Hello Liz, Good morning Liz, LIZ!" I dont think she has noticed yet, and after a month of us doing it, she still continues to walk right by us and into the classroom.


In the classroom, Liz has three faces: laughter, confusion, and hate. Although this is her second year "speaking English," she could easily fool an observing stranger into believing she doesnt even know where she is. She is notorious for staring into space, not following along in the book and being surprised by her name. On top of that, she is often angry at the most childish things (go figure, right?) I think Kids are mean by nature, all my kids know how to push each others buttons, but they also realize that no one really means it. Not Liz. Whenever a kid even looks at her wrong, she unleashes her patented face of hate. Everyone at Kids College knows what it looks like and now you do, too.


To accompany her face of hate, she also has a famous line that goes something like "I dont like everybody, I only like Mom, Dad, Grandmother...." and the list goes on as she rattles off every name she knows outside of class. She also becomes furious during gym sometimes - my kids are in love with freeze tag, it is their favorite game in the world but only about half of them enjoy being "it." Liz is one of them, but unfortunately, she is not the fastest kid in the class and throws a fit when she realizes she wont be able to tag anyone.


As for confusion, as I mentioned earlier, she is often confused by things as simple as her own name, whether someone is talking to her or not, and what a word is that we have not only been studying for a month, but she has also heard the 5 students say before her. I often feel as if I am not her main teacher, her main teacher is my smartest student, Jake, who I call on often to describe to her, in Korean, what it means to "cut" the picture out.

However, despite all the frustration she causes, she is also adorable. She will laugh at anything she can understand, most commonly the words butt and underwear, which, coincidentally, are the words she uses to answer most questions. She has a fixation with keeping her hands or fingers in her mouth, though she does not suck them, they just rest there, keeping her teeth company. More than once, she has sneezed right in the face of another student, which cracks me up because even after my repeated attempts to teach them to cover their mouths, they have not caught on and still wonder why they (and me) are always sick. Most importantly though, she is eager to please when she knows an answer or how to do something (maybe once a week), so that is the last face I will show you. This is the rare and elusive face of Liz when she knows what she is doing and is from our last field trip when she sang the song "Far and Wide," something she was obviously very excited to do.