Wednesday’s going to be a long day, and it appears it’s going to finish badly.

Today was the first day of classes and after stumbling through, and modifying on the fly, a new class diary system that lets me use a bunch of old notebooks (more on that in a future post) I actually had to stand in front of students.

This involved me lying to some students (part of the lesson) and then letting them lie about each other. In the last class, though, I just let them talk about themselves.

The first two classes are junior high school third year (US 9th grade) and they’ve already figured out the scam (Hey! We CAN’T fail.) The lowest level class has a few bad students from past classes but, except for seeing the fault lines, I’m not that worried about a major quake.

The sixth period class is a junior high second year class and they think they are cool for having survived their first year. Three of my Second Tier worst students (long story) are there including two who used to be in the higher level class and one of my First Tier worst students, who also used to be in a higher level class.

It will be a challenging class, but I’ve started to follow the Japanese tradition of having students stand up at the beginning and end of the class. That will be followed by them being silent while I talk or they won’t get to leave. I’ve done this before and I like it because it gives the class a clear starting point (most students treat the bell as a suggestion) which means they can’t just meander in as they feel like it.

Because the class is last period I also have a lot of ways to apply negative motivation, especially because I’m willing to stay late after school with them if need be. If the class ends up being tolerable, it will be because of that.