It is a truth universally acknowledged that getting out of bed on a rainy day is more difficult than getting out of bed on a sunny day.

Not only does the lack of sunlight keep you in sleep mode, but that white noise of rain fall helps keep you sleepy and comfortable and relaxed and (yawn). Add in the fact that it was cool and that I’d be leaving earlier than normal and that I wasn’t in the mood to arrive at school with soaked shoes and I seriously considered, for a few minutes, calling in sick.

Luckily, I didn’t.

Halfway through my first period class I took the odd step of actually checking the schedule for the rest of the term which is not something I normally do until mid June. (First shock: it’s already mid-June). When I did I realized that two of my classes (my first and second period classes on Monday) only had one class left after today. (Next week is a sports festival, probably. Long story.) I rushed the students through their final unit and scribbled a few notes about what to do on the last day.

Having one class remaining (probably) means I need to start thinking about review lessons and exam preparation for those students whilst at the same time thinking about making an exam for the grade I’m in charge of.

In this case, it should be noted, that “thinking about” means just that: “thinking”. No more and no less.

“Doing” will come later after a suitable period of denial and then panic.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Despite making a vow (non-binding) to take June more easily than usual, I’ve already thrown a student out of class. In my defense, I almost threw two out but didn’t.

Until sixth period everything was going well. Then one of my worst students arrived a couple minutes late and, despite the fact I was talking, proceeded to talk to other students rather than sit down. I walked him back to the door and told him he could go and then berated him all the way back to his chair when he decided he’d sit down.

Five minutes later (that’s seven minutes late if you’re keeping score) that student’s partner in crime arrived. I told him he needed to get a late slip “His reaction was really? Fuck.” I sent him out and told him he didn’t need to come back.

This entertained the first late student which led to a few minutes of random confrontation (one that, quite frankly, has been building for a long time). His favorite annoying technique is to go full toddler and keep asking “why” when I tell him to do something.

This time, after the second “why” I repeated myself and dared him to say “why” again. There was apparently something in my tone of voice or enough “soulless-just-plain-crazy” in my eye that he didn’t talk. In fact, after a few minutes he was pouting quietly.

This led to the next problem. After I explained the final project, which will take most of June to finish and involves visual aids and video cameras and how anyone who didn’t do it would fail, he and his partner asked if they could use their smartphones for “research.” As I suspected, the “research” took all class and they never wrote anything. I’m guessing the fact they chose the guy I’d thrown out as their third partner left them feeling exempted from having to do any work.

In the end, though, they’ll have to do something. If they don’t, all three fail and will have to take a make-up exam. If they don’t improve next class (I’ll roll back the anger for that one, in theory) I’ll give the better of the three a chance to change groups and leave the two bad students on their own.

They may be the kind who try to call my bluff though. That’s when the fun starts.

The sense of entitlement is pretty strong right now at the school where I work. This is mostly because we are in a between phase where there’s not much that can be done.

Last week was a full week, but it comes post-school trips which, as I’ve mentioned before, leaves the students feeling that school is something that interrupted their trip. and pre-midterm exams which means there are no clubs and it’s understood that there will be no homework.  It’s also understood that students are not supposed to be held after school as they should be home studying. (Insert canned laughter here.) That’s especially true this week, in the two days before the exams.

Making things even worse, my classes have no mid-term exams which means the students don’t take them that seriously until the end of the term when I do have an exam. Because of this, some students expect to have a free study session before the exams and are surprised when one is not forthcoming.

(Note: it is possible to get free study in my class, but it has to be earned by finishing work early.)

This leaves the more troublesome students feeling as if they don’t have to do anything because they feel as if they are untouchable. The school trip made them forget how school works and the mid-terms protect them from immediate consequences.

The result is one of my students insulting a colleague and then turning the word “magnetron” into a dirty word by reversing the “g” and the “n” in “magne” which makes it sound like a bad  Japanese word. This normally wouldn’t bother me that much as about a thousand years ago I was a teenage boy, but this kid isn’t in junior high school and wouldn’t drop the joke, even when I was trying to explain an assignment to the class.

I finally told him that if he didn’t stop saying the word he’d get in trouble. He played dumb, mostly trying to get me to repeat the word, but I finally got him to shut up when I told him no one was going to get a chance at free study until he stopped talking. (I also told him that if he asked “why” again I’d give everyone a writing project.)

I suspect that when the final project starts he and his partners will come up with some kind of lewd invention. That’s when the fun starts, though, as there will be no restrictions on how late I can keep them after school–the record is 6:30 p.m. if you’re counting–or how much homework I can give them. For example, I can have him write the bad word and the word “magnetron” 5,000 times.

And yes, I’ll either count them all or give him numbered sheets of paper so that he doesn’t have to count by himself.

It has become a tradition in the school where I work to let sleeping students sleep, so long as those students don’t belong in the class where they are sleeping.

If they do belong to the class, they are woken up right away and sent to their seats.

If they don’t, as long as they are not in another student’s seat, we have fun trying to figure out how long they will sleep before waking up and realizing they are in the wrong room.

In my case the record is 15 minutes. Fellow students attempted to wake the student and, after he didn’t wake up, I checked to make sure he was breathing. Once I confirmed he was breathing, i started class. After 15 minutes he suddenly woke up and looked around. He seemed confused as to why there was a foreigner at the front of the class. Once he realized what my job was, he then looked around and realized he was in the wrong class. He then made production of getting ready slowly as if to prove he were still cool, rather than groggy looking with drool stains on his face.

As I’ve mentioned before, something like this happened to me last week. Two students arrived late, one after the other, as they woke up and realized they were not where they were supposed to be. At least one remained in a semi-awake state the remainder of the class as he’d clearly been woken up before reaching a proper level of REM sleep.

The other had apparently gotten a proper amount of sleep as he had a lot of energy. Unfortunately it was not positive energy. Just noisy energy.

I confirmed with my colleague that they had been asleep in his class and not running around the school. Mind you, it didn’t matter what they were doing. All that mattered was they were late.

I surprised a teacher by telling him how good his class was. I’ll almost certainly regret that, but it is part of a plan.

In the past, when I’ve had bad classes I’ve done my best to report both good news and bad news. I do this because I recognize that having someone drag their problems into your work day can be a real pain as it used to happen to me more times than it should have. (More on that in another post.) It’s very easy to abuse that outlet and, over time, the homeroom teachers cringe as soon as one of us walks in the classroom.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that one of the times I brought good news, the teacher was happy I thought he might cry tears of joy. Mind you, his class was never good again, but I made his day at least once, and that good news helped me deliver bad news.

What’s unusual this year is that the homeroom teacher was the one who delivered the bad news. He told me the class were worse than my bad class last year as he visibly shuddered at the thought of teaching them.

However, they seem to be made up of mostly students from one of my better classes, albeit with a few unknown unknowns thrown in.  However, today they were pretty good and everyone did the writing and speaking (although i suspect one student cheated on the final speaking project). This is unusual enough for the first class after school trips that felt I should deliver this news to the homeroom teacher. At first he seemed to think I was lying, then he acted genuinely pleased that I’d brought good news.

Mind you, June is coming along with hot weather that is often accompanied by rainy season (note: it appears that it may actually rain during rainy season rather than before it in the season in which it rains.) When June arrives temperaments change. If nothing happens before summer, it almost always happens after.

Until then, I’ll keep saying nice things about the class every time they deserve it. Until it’s time to not be nice.

It may by the weather, or maybe I’ve added too much sugar back in my diet, but lately I’ve been in a mood at the school where I work.

Last week there were thrown papers and today I was pretty close to throwing them again when I taught the same lesson with a different class. (Luckily, a few students started moving about that time.)

For the second class today, I tried a different approach to that lesson and got better results, although with a class that behaves much better than the others.

Third period is when I started to see the effects of last week and when my mood started to manifest. Last week the high school second years were off to Okinawa, Kyushu or Shikoku as part of the school trip. They return as seasoned and weary world travelers who suddenly no longer feel the need to quietly endure the banalities of the local milieu.

I eventually dragged them through the lesson and had a few hours to recover and plan for the next lesson (and a few tomorrow).

Then sixth period rolled around and the students there suddenly forgot who I was and what I’m capable of doing when I’m in a mood.

First, no one had erased the board from the previous class. Although each class has designated board erasers, no one would fess up or accuse another. I told them that if I had to do it, I’d add time to the end of class. They forgot who I am and tried to call my bluff, making class 52 minutes instead of 50.

One student showed up with no paper, pencil or textbook. Every other word out of his mouth involved references to male genitalia and/or female body parts. I told him to shut up or get out.

Then, one by one, two missing students, who were apparently still asleep in their homeroom, slowly dragged themselves to class about 10 minutes late (more on things like that in another post).

Eventually, as I was working through the lesson, there came a point where I had to do some talking and try to elicit answers from the class. After a few attempts to do this, a lot of students weren’t listening so I implemented “Plan J” (named after a former colleague). I told them to translate every English word on one of pages into Japanese and that no one could leave until everyone was finished.

They eventually finished and then I assigned the homework.

The real surprise came when the bell rang and Mr Genitalia tried to leave. I reminded him he owed me two minutes. The prompted a reaction from the two who arrived late, as they’d missed the earlier drama.

The best part is, it isn’t even June yet. That’s when the real fun usually happens.

As a rule, on this blog, if I’m writing about school or the day’s events, it’s because I’m too lazy to write about something else. However, today is the exception to the rule.

As I’ve written before, at the school where I work we are in the middle of school trips and random science field trips. Unfortunately, because of the trip schedule, i had one class today and my students were not in the mood for class. At least they weren’t at first.

When I arrived at the classroom, a student insisted that the doors were closed. I think he meant locked because when I opened the door, there was a particularly rowdy student laying on the floor. He had, as near as I can tell, been holding the door closed. (Note: another student must have been holding the second door.)

The student, whilst sitting on the floor and blocking my path, said hello and I had to tell him to move three times. Right as I was planning a “step over with the left; accidentally kick/graze him with the right move, he scooted out of the way.

This was  a hint of the way the class was going to go.

My mistake was bringing the wrong visual aids, but after I retrieved the correct ones, I told my students to fetch their poster (they’d started the “design your dream neighborhood” project last week) and write and memorize their required ten sentences. They had 20 minutes.

I had to repeat myself a few times and by the third repetition, the students had yet to leave their chairs and were, instead, mocking me by parroting what I’d said.

At that point, rage and orneriness took over.

I picked up the bundle of dream neighborhoods and, after repeating that they should find their poster, I hurled the bundle across the room, in the general direction of the student who’d been blocking the door. I repeated they needed to find their posters and start memorizing.

At that point they moved “expeditiously” and found their posters.

At that point they began violating the “memorize it” requirement, but it was fun to see them panic…

It should have been bad but it wasn’t. Well, not completely.

I’m not sure if I’ve just become too cynical for my own good and am therefore not giving my students or myself enough credit.

Today was the day our junior high school students at the school where I work begin their annual “camp”. As I understand it, this is a time for bonding/getting out of regular classes and clubs that will be the last trip they take for a couple years. (Note: at the school where I work students take extended trips ever couple of years; between those years they suffer.)

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the school cancels afternoon classes for jhs 1s but leaves the morning classes in place. This doesn’t bother me that much as I also get a break, but it also usually means the morning classes are terrible as, in their minds, the students are already at camp.

However, both classes today were pretty good. Students actually did work and, for the most part, participated in activities.

However, they were rowdier than usual and there was a clear cut off in both classes–at around the 40 minute mark–when students in both classes all seemed to decide they were finished. At that point they became more rowdy and most of them stopped listening to any words I said.

However, because I knew what was happening, I mostly let them get away with “retiring” early. I couldn’t give them homework and there was no way to keep them after school. If I withheld the punishment until the next class, the reason for the punishment would be lost somewhere in the past. (It would be, if I’ve done the math correctly, the equivalent of punishing me for something I did over four weeks ago which is something that only happens in marriage, not in the real world. Something like that.)

Next week I’ll be dealing with the aftermath of three different school trips. That, however, is a problem for another post.

They don’t understand me yet, and that could end badly for all of us.

One of the things you watch for as a teacher is which class is going to be “that class”. This is the class that makes your hair more gray and makes you consider actually having a secret bottle of hooch in your desk rather than just joking about it.

The students in “that class” will try to challenge you and won’t give up until they get a reaction.

For example, in my high school second year class “that student” called my name and, when he had my attention, said “sex”. (I asked him how much money he had which led to a discussion of me being prostitute which stepped all over whatever joke he was about to make/had made.)

Despite that, however, the early contender for “that class” appears to be a junior high school first year class.

They are the first JHS 1 class I’ve ever had where students are consistently tardy. One student has been late four of six class meetings. He also likes to take 10 minute toilet breaks after five minutes of speaking Japanese and me either telling him to sit down or just ignoring him until he finally asks me in English. His English doesn’t appear to be that good so he’s not just a bored returnee who grew up in the USA or the UK. Also, students don’t look at him for translations of what I’m saying.

Other students are just loud, including a couple who’s English skills appear weak enough that they’ll end up being sent to the lower lever part of the class. (More on that in another post.)

One kid apparently never bought the book.

Another student justified not working by saying the Japanese word for “penis” several times until I started to escort him to the vice principal.

In their defense, they did manage to cobble together a conversation and memorize it in time to actually earn some marks. Eventually they will push harder and discover that I’m more than willing to keep them busy at lunch or after school. In fact, I do this for sport, especially early in the year when it establishes a necessary precedent.

All things considered, he wasn’t too bad. But he did try to play games.

Today was our first day back after the three days of Golden Week holidays. Students, although most of them have been attending club practice, had easily gotten used to the idea of coming to school without going to school. This meant that classes were a bit rowdier than usual and a few students, at least in my class, tired to get away with things they hadn’t tried to get away with before.

In my first class, during the warm up (which involves students standing to answer questions, getting to sit when they answer, and the last man standing starting the new row) one particularly rowdy student decided he could blurt out the answer without raising his hand or phrasing his answer in the form of a sentence.

When I ignored his answer and chose someone else he got pouty and refused to answer the next several questions. Eventually he seemed to realize I’d keep him standing all class until he answered and he quickly raised his hand and answered in a sentence.

The rest of the class went well and that student tended to finish his work quickly. After that he took advantage of his “free” time to put his head down and take a nap. (Since he was finished I let him rest, especially as he would disrupt the class if awake.)

The rest of my classes went well, although every class had someone try to cause trouble. A JHS 1 decided he didn’t need to do any work at all and another JHS 3 decided he could sleep before finishing, This act earned him the first of his classes “yellow cards” (more on that in another post).

Now it’s time to settle into the weekend and very briefly ponder what the students have in store next week. Then I’ll quickly forget what I pondered and enjoy the weekend.