For Teachers and Students Alike, It’s Been Water Torture

These kids spent the last few days cooped up in a classroom, studying--in a certain grim irony--underwater creatures.

The rain fell so hard, they hadn’t been let out for recess since last week, and the tetherball, handball and foursquare courts on which they normally play at Canoga Park Elementary School were barren stretches of wet asphalt.

It was a sodden, sorry excuse for a schoolyard. After all, it takes children to make a playground.

The second- and third-graders in Hilda Marino’s bilingual-education class watched disconsolately as stormy skies unleashed a deluge that washed away their recesses, raining out every playground activity but puddle jumping.

Believe me, these 8- and 9-year-olds were tired of the rain.

On Tuesday, the corrugated steel steps leading to their classroom bungalow were submerged in a foot of water. But Marino said her class was lucky: Their classroom was waterproof while other campus bungalows leaked, the droplets beaning students and teacher alike.

“My shoes got wet and it got my socks wet, too,” complained student Elina Aguirre.

She told me she’d rather have the sun out so she could go skating with her friends instead of having to trudge to school with her pink, flowered umbrella.

And that’s the problem with rain when you’re a kid--you go stir-crazy.

“All children need activity,” explained Principal Forrest Ross. “They get restless, just like adults get cabin fever. They’re up to their limit of rainy weather, just like you and I.”

So when the rain finally stopped just before lunch on Wednesday, Marino asked her students to quiet down, sit at their desks and wait quietly to be dismissed.

But even with freedom at hand, they were fidgety, talkative and rambunctious.

It took several minutes before Victor Macias and his tablemates finally found the proper deportment: tongues silent, hands folded in front of them, no squirming.

Excused, they gleefully lit out for the cafeteria and a meal of breaded chicken nuggets, corn niblets, scraggly salad and apple juice.

“Do you have earplugs?” Marino asked. “You’ll need them,” she said, as the din swelled from 100-plus squirrelly kids--turned loose at last.

After making quick work of their food, about a dozen of them sitting on the same side of a long lunch table were struggling against one another in a game of push-of-war, trying to send the last person on each end of the bench tumbling to the ground.

“ Ayudame, commadres ,” squealed Dahliana Vasquez to her friends. The ear-piercing volume and tone at which this request was delivered was being emulated by just about every other student in the vicinity. It was something only slightly worse than Yoko Ono singing.

The only child not screaming asked me if I was going to finish my food. When I said no, she grabbed my apple.

When lunch was over, Marino gathered her charges in a line of little Jemimah Puddle-Ducks.

She warned them to stay out of the water, but already a flurry of excited splashing was breaking out in the ranks.

“I like puddles because the water jumps up when you step in it,” said Oscar Campos, making a rainy-day tramp through the drenched playground sound like a physics experiment.

His classmates shared his love of the rain’s shallow souvenirs.

“I have my shoes so my feet don’t get wet,” said the exuberant Dahliana, pointing to her sporty red-and-black rain boots as she hopped smack into a puddle. Nearby students scattered.

“Just observe, this is not natural behavior!” exclaimed Marino, who was not quite so successful as Noah in leading her charges to dry land. “See how their adrenaline is up? The weather has them hyper. They’ve hit their saturation point.”

Back in the classroom, Marino sat the kids down on a brightly colored rug.

“I’m going to check your feet to see who was in the water,” she threatened. Some youngsters looked down at their muddy sneakers nervously.

But after an anguished moment, she softened.

“How many of you love puddles?” she queried, a smile on her face. Every hand but one went up, and the lone dissenter explained with a scowl that he just didn’t like to get wet.

The rest of the afternoon was spent learning about lobsters, and the children constructed facsimiles of the crustacean with crayons, construction paper and pipe cleaners.

Earlier this week, they all made whales out of shopping bags, cardboard and acrylic paint. A sightless pod of the giant mammals loomed on students’ desks, awaiting the application of eyes.

With all the water on the playground recently, they might have been planning to establish their own aquarium.

But, as if to squelch their plans for maritime research, during the creation of the model lobsters’ white-pipe-cleaner antennae, the sun came out for the first time in days.

Spontaneous “Yays!” reverberated in the classroom, and a few minutes later Marino was singing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” to herself. When the school bell finally rang, most of the children ran across the playground to meet their parents, a trio of boys stopping to slap noisily at the tetherball. A few others gathered near the backstop to talk.

At long last, the schoolyard was as it should be--full of kids, chatter and sunshine.