I have a high school second year class (11th graders) that’s ahead of my other classes. This is not because they are smart, but because they have more days off than anyone else and I’m having to move faster through the curriculum.

Today the students were supposed to present the superheroes they’ve spent three days creating. The presentation involves memorizing a short speech about and making a poster (usually traced from a template and then hand colored) of their superhero. To save time and give them more time to finish, I opted to have them deliver the speech only to me rather than  in front of the entire class. In classes where I have more time, it will be speech in front of everyone.

However, the superheroes assignment has its problems.

First, I had a student develop a superhero baby who was completely dependent on his mysterious mother who was not actually going to make an appearance in the speech. I pointed out that the baby had to do something because he’d be one of the stars of the final project. I sent the student back to rethink things but he didn’t do much. I also suspect that, because there are no templates for babies and he has to free hand draw the picture, he’ll soon be aging the super baby.

Second, another student keeps explaining that he doesn’t want to memorize the speech and I keep explaining that I want him to memorize the speech which means he doesn’t have a choice. That said, because this student has a lot of “issues”, I’ll probably let him get by with memorizing the first part and reading the rest.

Third, one student appears to have directly ripped off a character from Psycho-Pass, which means he’s got some ‘splainin’ to do next class. I don’t keep up with what’s popular in manga and anime, but I could tell by the reaction of his friends that something suspicious was afoot. I therefore consulted our local manga/anime experts (three other foreign teachers) about who the character might be.

Fourth, one student will probably not finish the project and that’s probably my fault. When he first brought his speech to show me, his superhero’s name was “Chin-Man”. in Japanese, this translates roughly to “Penis Man”. I saw the name and sent him back to make a few changes without reading anything else. He put his head down and went to sleep.

Today he presented the same speech with “Penis-Man” now dubbed “Turtle Man”. However, the backstory is still the same which makes the original name seem rather creepy: Turtle Man is an elementary school teacher who only helps little girls because he likes little girls. (Use the original name and you’ll understand.)

I said he sounded like a villain, as did Turtle Man, and noted that the speech was 60 words too short. The student came back later with 60 words of padding about Turtle Man’s house and neighborhood. I told him that wasn’t what he was supposed to write and asked him to explain how Turtle Man uses his powers to help, sigh, little girls. My student said he didn’t know and I switched to “loud mode” (a technical term) and told him he had to know because that’s what the speech was supposed to be about. I sent him back to make edits but he just sulked more and kept the guy behind him from working.

If it’s only going to be presented to me I actually don’t care if the students have questionable characters (several hundred years ago I was a teenage boy, too) but stuff like that disrupts the class too much so I don’t allow it to go in front of the entire class.

I do, however, expect them to do the work, especially when I told them on day one they couldn’t use “I don’t know” as an answer. Why do they insist on using it? I don’t know.