Today I asked one of my colleagues if he knew anything about a student I’m teaching. He just laughed.

That was all the answer I needed.

After all the years I’ve been teaching at the school where I work, I remaine amazed at how different one class is from the other, even in the same room. In my first year high school classes (10th grade) I’ve got one good class, one average class, and one that promises to age me at a much faster rate than normal. The funny part is that class is made up of two different sections of the same grade. (Basically about half the class is from one section and the other half from another).

The students from “the other half” are loud, sarcastic and rude. Even worse, they are confrontational. Today I was very close to throwing a boy out of class (the one I asked about) because his basic form of response involved slurping noises and raspberries and putting on a show for his friends. He was also disguising his poor English level with sarcasm and back talk (in Japanese, of course). Normally I ignore those kids, unless they drag others along, but today, when I’m explaining the class rules, I give the bad boys the attention they crave.

Some of this trouble is caused because the classes are arranged, roughly, by club, with baseball boys tending to be in the same class and soccer boys in another class. This means the classes have different moods and the bad boys have a lot of friends around to act as an audience

The other part of the problem is that only a month ago the students were still in junior high and couldn’t fail and couldn’t be thrown out of class. (Well, they can, but it’s complicated and involves other teachers. Long story.) They are still of the belief that there’s not much I can do to them.

They are wrong.

First, they can fail. At least two students were held back in 10th grade last year. One dropped out/moved on, the other chose to repeat the grade. Another student failed on attendance but managed to get himself promoted to 12th grade, albeit with lots of complicated caveats.

I can also give them lots of extra work (much of which I will mark as received but never actually read)

The students have also forgotten that my class is last period. I have all the time I need. (My record for keeping an entire class late is 25 minutes.)

At the end of class, after explaining the stick, I threw them a carrot and let them relax for the last five minutes. The bad boy asked why I hadn’t done that sooner. I told him it was because I’d had to spend so much time trying to get him to shut up. If he’d been quiet, they would have been able to relax sooner.