If there had been chocolate waiting for me, perhaps what happened might not have happened. Well, actually, it would have happened, but at least I’ve some chocolate right now.

Today was the last class before the new year’s holiday for my evening class. Because they won’t have class until 2017, I gave them a few homework assignments: write a speech; do some grammar homework; speed read a couple short essays; write 150 words of personal journal each day.

The more I wrote, the less happy they became. When I said “Merry Christmas” and gestured the writing on the board, they insisted on pointing out that what I was doing was not, in fact, that merry.

It doesn’t matter to me though. As I pointed out, it’s 2016 now, but their homework isn’t due until 2017. That gives them an entire year to finish it.

Now I’m on vacation. Sort of. (More on that in a future post.)

It started with an excuse, then some panic. Then another student smirked when I told he just failed the term. I’m not sure what he’s thinking, but he seems to have been having a term long teenage moment so perhaps he’s not thinking at all.

Either way, I suspect I’ll have a rather lonely make-up test day unless he realizes I’m not bluffing.

My last class of the term started with a student admitting he was stupid because he’d forgot the pictures he needed for his final project. He thought he’d be able to do the speaking part without the pictures. I told him that was impossible and gave him and his partner some paper and instructions to draw some pictures. In the end they did their presentation and will pass, albeit with a lower score than they could have earned.

A second group did their presentations, but one member hadn’t done the two previous speeches. I told him a bad speech was better than no speech and he grunted a response.

Several minutes later I saw him playing with his phone and told him to come up and do his speeches. (In my world “playing with your phone” equals “I’ve finished my assignment and have nothing else to do”.) He had nothing ready and dismissed me with a smile. I told him he’d just failed with the lowest possible score (alas, I can’t give zeroes) and he smirked as if he thought I was joking.

On Friday he’ll discover I wasn’t joking. Then, next year in early January I’ll be waiting for him at the make-up exam. I doubt I’ll see him though. I may end up just standing in the room by myself.

Not the first time, won’t be the last.

For a few minutes I was calm, then I panicked and stayed that way a while. You can blame a sound technician.

Because I’m still paranoid about the listening test, I approached the sound booth whilst simultaneously retracing my mental steps to see if I’d actually tested both CDs before submitting them. I decided I had. Probably.

Then the sound technician arrived and started doing his pre-checks. The sound was a bit uneven with one speaker sounding low and the other sounding louder. I made a couple jokes about that and then he started to play the listening to double check his settings.

What I heard went something like “Number Two. It is my favorite superpower because scritchscritchscritchskipgoogoogooskipscritch Number Three.”

Panic set in and I thought about where I could buy a suit for the ensuing apologies until I realized he was just fast-forwarding the CD. However, after that I couldn’t calm down until the entire listening had finished.

Luckily, after that, everything went well. There was only one question and I got a chance to relax. Once my heart started beating regularly anyway.

I’m having an argument with a student who rarely speaks.

Last week I expressed my displeasure at his having copied large sections of Wikipedia and presenting them as his daily personal journals. This has him pouting. He complained last week during the required “research what happens if you plagiarize” assignment, and he complained this week too.

This week involved him declaring he liked the other teachers at the school better (I would, too) and saying how he didn’t understand how I could possibly think that what he did was plagiarism. My profound response, written in the margins of his journal: “Because it was plagiarism.”

I also gave him some encouragement as my angry response has him questioning his plans to study in the USA. I told him to stick with it but that I can’t help him if he insists on presenting work that isn’t actually his work. The purpose of the journal isn’t to fill the pages, but to practice writing.

Sometimes, I try to be the good cop. Or at least I will, once I figure out what the good cop does other than offer a cigarette and a glass of water.

One of the listening tests today was so short that those of us in the teachers’ room were afraid something was wrong. I had an immediate flashback to horrors from my own past. The other was so long I’m pretty sure students fell asleep before it was finished.

The test on my listening test will be somewhere in between, although this year I did add a lot of nonsense to it to confuse and befuddle the students. (More on that in a future post.)

I bring this up because a couple years ago a few members of the staff complained that students finished our tests too soon and that created some sort of problem for the test proctors. I personally ignored this as I can’t control how fast the students finish, especially if they’ve lived in an English speaking country or simply given up quickly.

People who are more diplomatic (and, oddly, more well liked by the staff) made an attempt to lengthen their listening tests by adding pauses or extra listening sections.

Each exam includes a listening portion and we write, perform, record, and edit the listening sections ourselves. This leaves it up to our own preferences and/or energy levels.

The results today were a listening test that was less than three minutes long and a second that was 18 minutes long. It also means the second year junior high listening will probably be more difficult than the second year high school listening. But, I consider that part of the fun.

She surprised everyone, especially her fellow students, at least for a few seconds.

I have a student in my Sunday class who does so little it almost seems as if she’s merely auditing the class, not actually taking it. Her English level is low enough that I’m pretty sure she’ll never get the test scores required to go to a university outside of Japan. She’s also a lot older than most of my students–let’s just say she’s a lady of a certain age.–and I’m not sure why she’s taking the class.

She’ll do class work, but I usually put her in a group of three so that two students have someone to talk to. Her partners often lose patience with her, and I have to remind them not to abandon her.

If she does speeches, she usually reads the speech instructions rather than reading speech.

Today, though, when she got up to the front, she read something resembling an actual self-introduction speech. It was only twenty-eight seconds long and she never looked up from her paper, which meant she only got a few points, but it was twenty seconds longer than any other speech she’s ever done and was actually on topic which means she got more points than she’s ever received before.

The rest of the class was surprised and she seemed satisfied. I just hope she does it again, as there are still two speeches to go.

The students phoned it in and I pretty much only sent a message myself. That’s the best way to describe the last day of the term.

My Friday classes are all junior high school. Because the school where I work splits regular English and my class, the students perceive that my class doesn’t have a final mark which, int their minds, means they don’t have to study much. In fact our classes represent a percentage of their final English score, but the students realize that no one fails so they tend to worry about other classes. Granted, they don’t fail those either, but at least those get a final mark and are conducted in Japanese.

The highlights were a student asking what units where on the final exam. I reminded him that I’d told him all about that last class. He admitted he hadn’t written it down. I told him that wasn’t my problem. He then asked if there was a long writing. I told him that there was and that he was supposed to have written a practice draft the week before after I told him about the final exam. He admitted he no longer had the paper. I told him that wan’t my problem.

Luckily he didn’t ask anymore questions and I was able to focus on properly doing nothing.

To my students’ credit, no one seems to have plagiarized their assignment on plagiarism. They did, however, have some interesting interpretations of what they were expected to do.

As for me, I played bad cop by giving them a stern lecture about plagiarism, and then played good cop by giving them an easy activity and letting it all drop. In short, in a reverse-Roadhouse, I was not nice, until it was time to be nice.

The student whose actions triggered the assignment, was caught between playing dumb (I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to copy word for word) and being mad at me for being a jerk (in his defense, the role of bad cop requires one be a jerk). His journal entry had some bad English, but at least it was his English.

Pretty soon it’ll once again be time to not be nice. Right about the time I give them a speech assignment.

A placeholder tonight as nothing of importance happened today except things very much like things that happened yesterday.

My bad higher level class was bad. My lower level class wasn’t quite as bad. My worst students in my high school class were bad.

The only funny thing was in my high school class. My worst students were third in line for their presentation but rather than prepare for it (it helps to practice even though they don’t have to memorize it) they were doing homework from other classes.

When I called their number the moseyed up to the front and then 1) couldn’t figure out who was speaking first or 2) what order their pictures were supposed to be in. I sent them off to get their s#!t together.

One student realized that thanks to his partners he was about to fail and managed to salvage something  resembling a presentation by playing stage manager. Unfortunately he’s right. He is going to fail because of this partners. That’s one of the rules of the assignment.

What happened first wasn’t that surprising. What happened later was.

As predicted, the noise and inattentiveness of two classes inspired me to stop talking about the final exam. Instead I passed out an assignment and said “good luck”. Later I helped the students who actually seemed interested in passing.

I also sent three students back and forth between their desks and my desk until they actually completed their homework. (Long story.)

Then, this evening, as I was grading daily journals written by my university students, I realized that one of my students wrote well enough that he could have been an editor for Wikipedia. Actually, given that his “handwritten journal” matched a Wikipedia entry word for word, I suspect he might already be a Wikipedia editor. Or is it adopter?

Either way, all the students are now required to look up the word “plagiarism” and explain what will happen to them if they try that in the USA.

The trap is that I expect most of them to plagiarize the entry, which will lead to a teachable moment.