flonnebonne: (SaiSmile)
[personal profile] flonnebonne
It's currently spring break at my school, and the new school year is about to begin. I recently had to say goodbye to my third year students, half of my kindergarteners (they do kindergarten for two years here), and to quite a few of the teachers.


I have mixed feelings about saying goodbye to my third years. They were a, shall we say, difficult group of students to teach. To be more precise, there were a handful of misbehaved kids in each class (with the exception of class 3-4) who the teachers were unable to control. And when you have a few kids acting up and getting away with it, it makes the other students disrespect their teachers as well. Not that the teachers didn't try, but in Japan the discipline options are very limited and the students know they're going to graduate no matter what they do.

I didn't help matters any. I suck at discipline, but as an assistant teacher who hardly speaks any Japanese, it's not really my job to keep the students in line. I tried to talk to Ms. Morito, the third year English teacher, about maybe giving some of them detention, but she just gave me a standard "Mmmm, it's difficult" response, which basically means "No." I really could have done a better job at disciplining, but, yeah, sucky rookie here. Plus they were already pretty out of control when I arrived. They didn't bomb the school or anything, but they generally wouldn't siddown and shaddup when I or Ms. Morito were talking. They'd be walking around or chatting or throwing paper airplanes or cutting up their desks or whatever. A lot of them had just given up on studying English (or any other subject for that matter). In a way, I was kind of glad that they had some life in them and weren't all beat down by the system, but I also got pretty tired of trying to out-yell them.
 
Anyway, despite the discipline problems, I loved the little boogers…at times. Some of them were awesome, awesome students who would say the darndest things and who were really freaking smart and hard working. The third years were definitely the most entertaining of my students, if only because they were so weird, but I suspect my first and second years are just hiding the weirdness in their black little souls.


A rundown of the third year classes (please ignore the blatant favouritism toward certain students):

3-1
This class was somewhere in the middle in terms of behaviour, leaning towards the bad end. They were generally pretty disinterested in English. Notable students include Yagitazu (or is it Yaginuma?), the class president, a good, genki student with a tremendously bad singing voice and a small bald patch on the side of his close-shaved head. I don't think the bald patch was there at the beginning, but it was there for at least the last month of school. Did he keep shaving it off? Was it some sort of horrible disfigurement of which we must never speak. Other notable students: Daiki (I think?), because he looked almost exactly like one of my cousins in the Philippines, and Maya. Maya was…well, I don't think she had many friends, and she refused to talk to anyone in her class. When we did English activities I would always go act as her partner. I talked to Ms. Morito about it, and she was very evasive in that annoying Japanese way. So I tried to be as nice as possible to Maya. She came and visited me with her younger sister Natsumi during lunch break and after school to practice English and just to chat. We talked about anime and KAT-TUN and school life and surfed the internet until the other teachers would tell her to go home. She made a ring out of beads for me as well as a rose out of ribbon, and her sister Natsumi gave me a Christmas card. I gave them Canadian souvenirs and made Maya a graduation card. I wish Maya all the best and hope she comes out of her shell a little in high school.

3-2
Oh man, 3-2. Most definitely my worst-behaved class, but they could be, um, interesting to talk to. Number one offender was Itsuki-kun, who had a lot of evil buddies as well. Itsuki was probably not all that bad when he was a first year/second year student because he did know how to conjugate a lot of English irregular verbs. It's weird how some of the misbehaved students are actually pretty good at English. This class was notable for having the worst-behaved girls as well, particularly Kanami, Mika, and Ayana, the last of whom I actually liked a lot because she was fairly good at English and would try to speak with me. There was also that smart boy who refused to tell me his name but who would ask me to play sex with him and asked whether I liked boys' love or not. In English! Oh, and there was also Kazupon, whose real name I never learned. He was fairly quiet in class, but Ayana wrote a really sweet journal entry about how everyone calls him Kazupon because they like him and how she went to his birthday party in the summer. Awww. There was also a boy with glasses who talked to me a couple times in English about his favourite movies (Back to the Future and Cable Guy) who I really liked. But, um, I sadly forgot his name. It was a hard name!  

3-3
This class would have been awesome if they'd had a teacher who could discipline worth a damn. They were usually very lively and had great speaking skills. Japanese people have a very difficult time inflecting English properly, or at all, really, but some of the students in this class were very good at it. One of them, Yuu, participated in the district speech contest last September, and she's a sweetheart and smart as heck. Other notables: Karen, whose favourite manga is Naruto and who constantly doodles on her worksheets; Keishi, who is really smart and likes to show it off and gets away with it because he's so darn cute; Masaru, who is a very bad boy with dyed hair who likes Pokemon and gets away with it because he's so darn cute; Satoshi, who says lots of weird things in English like "I'm bad boy!"; and a bunch of other students whose names I sadly never learned. Noisy, noisy class, but great kids. Possibly my favourite third year class.  

3-4
The anomaly class. They actually behaved, probably because Ms. Morito was their homeroom teacher. It was a nice break to go to 3-4 when I had four third year classes to go to on Tuesdays for the last few months of the school year (god, I hated Tuesdays). But 3-4 was pretty tired and beaten down, like senior students are supposed to be in the Japanese system. Notables: Akiko, who participated in the speech contest and who wrote me a lovely thank-you letter in English at the end of the year; Kasumi, who was very sweet and would wave hello to me a lot; Ryota, who sometimes visited me outside of class, who had terrible English abilities but who always really really wanted to get stickers; Yuuya (?), a short little guy who tried hard and asked me and Ms. Morito for help a lot; Egg Head, whose real name I don't know, who must have been really smart because he rocked the house when we played Jeopardy; Yuuta, a smart geeky boy who always, always had manga with him and was a big fan of Evangelion; and Masaya, who had great English abilities and always went the extra distance on my worksheets. Ryota and Yuuta were friends with Maya from 3-1, and we would all sometimes walk partway home together. Oh, and the day after graduation I ran into Yuuta when he came to visit the school. He showed me a picture on his shiny new cell phone of Pikachu getting beaned by a Pokeball. Good times.

3-5
Probably the second worst-behaved class after 3-2. Some of the boys in this class seemed to skip class a lot and liked to play with scissors. Needless to say, they didn't do any of my English activities. But I liked a lot of the students in this class, and there were lots of very smart kids. Notables: Yukiko from the basketball and track and field teams, who totally looked the part, super-friendly and smart; Hiroto, who sat beside Yukiko for most of the year and often partnered up with her; Jun, who's just really freaking smart and confident, though I didn't talk to him much; Daisuke, another smart boy; Yuuta, who kept writing and performing skits about a person getting cancer who gets told to go sit in time-out; Shouko, who made a bracelet for me, which I think might have been a bit of a bribe to not rag on her and her friends during class so that they could chat; Shouko's friends, one of whom was dating bad-boy Itsuki from 3-2 and another who was dating a high school boy; Hayato, a special needs student, who always mumbled but who I tried to talk to a bit toward the end of the year, and who gave me a whackload of presents (including, like, a flash light and wet naps and anime stuff!); and Taiki, who kept nattering on about loving natto cake and how delicious it is and how he would bake natto cakes from scratch. Taiki's a bit plump, and I saw a picture of him lagging behind the other students in the school marathon last spring. One of the teachers rode on a bike beside him to cheer him on and keep him company. You know why this happened? Too much natto cake.


Graduation

And then it was time to say goodbye.

I only met these kids in August of last year, so it wasn't like I watched them grow cute ickle first years into ginormous third years. I'll miss them, but I wasn't a puddle of tears during graduation. I did cry a little when one of the girls giving a speech was so choked up she could barely get her words out, but I felt like I was crying for their sadness more than my own.

It made me so sad to think about the students having to leave behind their friends and teachers. Japanese junior high schools are set up in a way that you kind of have to form very tight bonds. The students are assigned to classes and they stay there--it's the teachers who move around--so they're always with the same 30 or so of their peers. And when they move up in grade level they stay in the same classes and the teachers move up with them, so they often have the same teacher for three years. The homeroom teacher is especially influential, since the students see him/her at least three times a day. Teachers in general seem very involved with their students' lives, and the staff room is almost always open for students to wander around in. And then there's school clubs, which meet six days a week, without fail, even during holidays. Well, maybe not the art club and whatnot (I'm not sure), but the sports clubs do.

Can you imagine graduating from that kind of environment? It's like saying goodbye to your family. But there wasn't actually a ton of crying at my school's grad ceremony. Maybe it's just this year, I don't know. Maybe it's because I was only able to see the boys from where I was sitting, and the girls, unbeknowest to me, actually had bucketloads of tears ruining their school uniforms. But they looked fairly non-weepy after the ceremony as well, when they were walking out of the school and waving goodbye to us. Maybe it's just because they're teenagers. As for the teachers, there was a bit of silent crying from the women, but I don't think I saw any sobbing male teachers. Maybe they're all used to it.

Anyway, the ceremony itself was not especially interesting. Everyone was very serious, there were lots of speeches by old men, most of which I didn't understand, and some rather more heartfelt speeches by the students. The third year female teachers were all wearing…um, I don't think they were kimono, but they were beautiful something-or-others.      

There were a lot of thank-you gifts and gestures flying around this month. One of the things the classes did was write messages to teachers on these square…cardboardy thingies, which the teacher could keep. Yeah, me fail English. I didn't receive any of these because I didn't know the students long enough, and they probably didn't want to write to me in English. But it looks like a wonderful present. I'd like that more than flowers. Especially if it were written in English, because I could look back at it and say, "I helped teach them this."

My second years, though I'll be seeing them again in the new school year (just a couple weeks from now), really surprised and moved me with their end-of-year thank yous. They're a quiet bunch, but they generally work hard. Just goes to show how much you can't overlook the quiet ones. They're going to be the new third years soon; here's to them, and to another year.
 
I'll talk about my kindergarteners and the teachers in my next post. Hopefully.

Date: 2007-03-28 07:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] zoesque.livejournal.com
My favourite is still clothespin-for-a-pet kid. Epic.

Also I thought you might enjoy this comic. I thought of you. <3

Date: 2007-03-29 10:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] juin.livejournal.com
It's kind of been my plan to be teaching in Japan by the end of this year, but I've only just found out that I totally missed the 2007 deadline for JET. D: Which means that I'm now considering the NOVA program, and I was wondering if you know anything about it? Have you met anybody who's in Japan with NOVA? Any info would be appreciated. :D

Date: 2007-03-29 12:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] juin.livejournal.com
Yeah, the salary is definitely lower; am thinking of getting TESOL certification, because apparently you get paid more if you have it. Also, is it true that with JET you're not allowed to do private tuition?

Date: 2007-03-29 01:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] juin.livejournal.com
Hmm, kay then. Which town are you in, btw?

Date: 2007-03-29 02:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] juin.livejournal.com
Wow, only 12718 people. :O I went a little stir-crazy in Bordeaux, and that has a population of... 1 million? According to Wikipedia, but not that I ever noticed. XD Is your town close to other towns/cities, though?

Date: 2007-03-29 02:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] juin.livejournal.com
Okay, I'll stop badgering you with questions now but only because I'm going to bed. Thanks for all the info. :D

Wassup everyone !

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