Mostly all I did was sit around today. There wasn’t much else for me to do.

During exams at the school where I work our main job, after writing the exams and recording the listening sections, is to sit and wait. We are not the exam proctors, but we are on call in case there are questions and/or crises.

During high school exams we at least get to sit at our desks and “do work” but during junior high exams our job is to occupy desks that are not ours and generally be loud and obnoxious.

Some of us, though, well, some of the others actually, do attempt to “do work”.

We sit in the tiny junior high teachers’ offices and wait to be called. Typically there aren’t that many questions, but that seems to alternate between years. In the past, we’ve discovered mistakes on exams that required us to enter the rooms and write the corrections on the blackboards.

The main hassle is the jhs teachers’ offices are tiny little rooms that remind me of the guard rooms at prisons. (In fact, the rooms overlook a large atrium that could be mistaken for a cell block, if you ignore that there are no bars or women in orange suits.)

Because the rooms are so small, even a quiet conversation between us becomes a disturbingly loud distraction to any poor teachers attempting to “do work”.

After that, we sorted our exams and I then spent the rest of the day sitting whilst I marked exams.

He was asleep in the back which meant, so long as he appeared to be breathing, I let him sleep and carried on with class. Ten minutes into class he finally woke up and realized he was somewhere.

(Note: If he hadn’t been breathing, I would have contacted proper authorities rather than continuing with class.)

The last day of the term is, traditionally, whether I want to or not, a day for study and/or play. The students finish review lessons and, in theory, are supposed to make pairs and practice things out of the book, but in practice they end up playing various rock-paper-scissors games and a version of football with erasers.

Today my classes were mostly outside of their homerooms which means students didn’t have easy access to their stuff. Despite my suggestion to always bring something to study for when they’re done with they’re assignments, the students never bring anything to study except when it costs them points. (Long story.)

Because it was the last day if the term, and I’m ready to be done with classes and get into exams and summer vacation, I did the equivalent of phoning in a lesson even though I was present in the classroom. This meant I checked assignments and answered questions and mostly ignored what was going on so long as sports and/or violence weren’t involved.

Or singing. I don’t allow singing.

They never believe me until it’s too late. Then they act as if it’s the first time they’ve ever heard it.

Part of the problem of not having a regular textbook for the second grade high school classes at the school where I work is that the students tend to not take the worksheets they get seriously. Although we emphasize that these sheets are, in fact, their textbook and that the final exam will consist of grammar and vocabulary from those sheets, many students act as if there is no exam and that there are no consequences for their not keeping the worksheets.

That changes this week.

Today I had several students react with surprise that they were supposed to have kept the worksheets. I pointed out the rules–which, oddly, they had kept–and they continued to act surprised. They then asked me for another copy of the worksheet and I pointed out the line in the rules that says they only get one copy.

Every now and then one of them gets angry and 1) acts as if this all this is my fault–which, technically, as their teacher it is; and 2) acts as if I care–which I don’t.

I do offer some advice: make a copy of a worksheet filled in by one of your classmates. Just make sure you pick a classmate who’s smarter than you.

More than once in my career as a K-12 student, I witnessed the warping of time as the minute before the end-of-school bell stretched to an hour.

There are scientific reasons for this involving near-light speed, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the gravity of large objects warping space time, physics and, yeah, well, look it up.

In my professional career this warping of space and time manifests as a lengthening of the month of June. This is partly because the Japanese government has seen fit to 1) have classes in June when God intended there to be no classes and 2) have no national holidays in June. This year the government even trolled us by creating a new national holiday–F@#king Mountain Day–in August.

The last week June, and therefore the term, seems especially long as there are complicating factors involving making exams, recording listening sections, editing listening sections, burning CDs, burning them again correctly, and proofreading exams. We are also dealing with stragglers hurrying to finish final projects.

Oddly, June has actually seemed to go pretty quickly this year. This means the coming week is going to last forever.

As a rule, about a week before the end of the term at the school where I work, I give my students the details of the final exam. This often ends badly.

One of the quirky things we do for junior high school students is tell them what the long writing/essay will be and give them a chance to practice. This means we are giving them, for free, twenty to thirty percent of the exam.

Also as a rule, if students aren’t listening–i.e. several are speaking when I’m attempting to explain the exam–I stop explaining and wish them the best. This has resulted in students suddenly discovering the concept of “professionalism” and accusing me of not having it. I wished them luck again and erased the information on the board.

The problem is, as I’ve explained before, we (the foreign staff) teach a class that’s an elective that everyone has to take. Because it’s an elective, it has different rules than regular classes. For the past few years our classes have been a percentage of the regular English class mark, but that’s been a mixed blessing. This is a huge improvement over the old system, where we had a grade system where the lowest grade possible was a “C”.

On the one hand the new system makes us more legit than we used to be because we are part of their official English mark; on the other hand, we are still a class that, to the students, is not real English because we don’t give grades. On the third hand (no, really, count them) students, whatever they do or don’t do, are not going to fail. The worst that can happen is they don’t get automatic acceptance into the high school.

Some students worry though, and they’re the ones being punished by me wishing them good luck instead of explaining the exam.

The good news was they were much improved; the bad news is they have to do it all again because it was even shorter than the first time.

It is a general rule of public speaking that, if you are given a minimum time to meet, you should make your speech at least 30 seconds longer than necessary, or perhaps even a minute longer. A speech that must be at least two minutes long should actually be at least two minutes and thirty seconds long, but preferably three minutes. I remember at least one occasion in school when I’d practiced a speech that came up too short. I tried to explain how it had been perfect at home and the teacher was like “Yeah, how about that? Too bad you’re not at home.” (Something like that.)

The problem is that, even if you’ve practiced at home and have the speech measured to the exact second, when you get in front of people adrenaline takes over and you speak a lot faster. Your two minute speech becomes barely a minute and a half and your teacher is glaring and you whilst removing several points from your final score.

In the case of today’s students, their first attempt at a TV commercial (long story) came in at one minute and twenty seconds and I sent them back for a rewrite.

Then, today, when they attempted their second chance they made the second mistake: they made the script longer but then practiced it so much they were much smoother but spoke too fast. Their new speech came in at barely seventy seconds. I suggested a couple ways to make it longer and sent them on their way.

Unfortunately for them, the record is four do-overs. In two of those, the presentation got shorter and shorter. This means I may be seeing these guys a lot in the next few days.

I’d make them practice more, but it’s probably too late.

Today was a slow start thanks to a number of sports events that cancelled all the regular junior high classes at the school were I work. Some students were out doing sports while the non-athlestes were at school enjoying movies and other distractions that didn’t involve me.

It was a nice break and gave me a chance to do some planning and save a little energy for the rest of June.

For some unknown reason, tomorrow is a regular schedule and Wednesday was listed as a partial schedule to accommodate the rest of the sports tournaments. I was hoping that tomorrow would be a tournament as it would give me an entire day off. On Wednesday I would lose two classes but have one class in the afternoon.

However, it’s probably for the best that the tournament was on Wednesday as it saved me a lot of potential heart break.

It turns out that the teams at the school where I work did so badly they will not be going to the second day of the tournaments. Because of this, they will be having regular classes. Since I have to go in anyway on Wednesday, losing that rest won’t be that big of a deal. Losing and entire day off, though, would be depressing at this point in the school year.

As it stands now, I’ll be able to put the extra classes to good us. I’ll have the students practice sports a lot more to get ready for the October version of the tournaments.

It’s too late to do anything for them now, but they still have a few months to get better.

As we reach the middle of June, it’s traditional that the main part of my job is staying awake.

Because June is a busy time at the school where I work, I often schedule projects that require the students to do most of the work while I pace around pretending to be attentive or I sit and work on personal projects.

The problem with the former is I end up drifting off while walking and just end up pacing back and forth, which is a waste of time. The problem with the latter is that it’s easy to get relaxed which means it’s easy to drift off to sleep.

The other problem is that eventually I have to sit and listen to the final projects. This starts out well but, at a certain point, the bad English and occasionally low voices leads to me slowly drifting off. I don’t fall asleep, I just go elsewhere. This often leads to puzzled looks when I miss the ending, ask them the change parts when they’ve already done so, or fail to take any notes and just assign a score based on the mood I’m in at the time.

(Note: If I’m in a bad mood I take that as subconscious proof that the speech was terrible even if I wasn’t consciously listening.)

Today’s problem was a little different: I didn’t actually care and neither did the students. My JHS 3’s were finishing and performing game shows. They had last class to write and today to practice and perform.

The problem is, there wasn’t much practice.

One group peppered their “game show” with facts that surprised one of their members. This meant, of course, that they hadn’t actually practiced and/or he was talking with a friend the entire time. I was more interested in his reaction than to their performance.

At the end of the term they get their Speech Contest assignments as summer homework. This leads to us hearing the same basic speech again and again and again.

That means that at the end of September. I’ll be pretending to be interested whilst trying to stay awake.

As we reach the end of the term at the school where I work I find myself facing an ethical dilemma.

At the end of the term, those of us teaching junior high school first year classes will have a meeting to decide which students to send where. Right now the classes are divided only by number. However, after we finish with them, they will be divided into “S” classes, which are higher level and “R” classes which are lower level. After we finish, the “S” classes will have 20 students whilst the “R” classes have 14.

The ethical dilemma involves troublesome students who also happen to have good English. Do I play things honestly and keep the good students in the higher level class or do I find way to fail them and get them sent to the lower class?

Similarly, there’s also the dilemma with troublesome students who have poor English. Do I pump up the scores of students who’d otherwise stay in the lower level “R” classes and pass my problems onto others or do I write down the crappy score they’ve earned and keep them the rest of the year?

Thus far there are only a few students creating the dilemma. Two in the future “S” classes who are at the edge of “restless and filled with bored energy” and “future asshole”. Often, with the higher level classes, the influx of students from the other class changes the class dynamic for the better. (However, there’s always THAT class.)

With the lower level class, the influx of weaker students often changes the dynamic for the worse. The new students don’t like the new accent (which they can’t understand) and they feel compelled to test the new teacher’s limits.

Eventually, students in both classes will hit their puberty growth spurt and as their bodies grow their brains will shrink to teenage size. This makes them ready to be second year junior high school students, who are usually the worst students.

The trouble is, I’m not the only one making these decisions and we probably offset. Sigh.

I wish I could say it went downhill when my student saw the mascot from a distance and decided it had a penis on its face. Unfortunately, at least for him, the problems started early and a few students are suddenly realizing that things are getting serious.

In my high school second year class my students are working on their term projects. This is a three week/six class project that requires them to “invent” a product and write commercial for it. Starting next week we will begin filming the commercials, which will be shown in class. (Sort of. Long story.)

The students are in groups of three and are also required to develop some sort of visual aid to help them sell their “invention”. Students who don’t do the project will receive the lowest possible score for the term (a 1 out of  10). This means they will have to take the make up exam or risk failing the year.

Because of this rule, I always encourage students to choose their partners wisely. Unfortunately for one group, they chose poorly.

One student worked well the first day and then decided he was finished. He started playing something on his phone (which are allowed as dictionaries) and clearly wasn’t helping his other two partners work. At some point, he saw a mascot (a person in a cartoonish animal suit) off in the distance near the bus stop and decided the elephant trunk and small white tusks on the mascot’s face represented a penis. This led to much distraction.

Eventually, toward the end of class, I told him and his partners they’d earned a zero for the day. At this point the partners rebelled with “all of us?” and “why?” I referred them to the assignment sheet and the list of rules which explained that all partners would be punished for the actions, or non-actions, of their partners.

Next class the performances start and, potentially, people will have to redo their commercials or fail.

The record is four repeats. I suspect the group that failed today may set a new record.