There was an accident in what’s emerging as my worst class today and that gave one of my worst students a chance to be bad.

The funny part is, the sleeper in that class stayed awake. (More on that in a minute.)

Early on in the class (which happens to be first period) I noticed a puddle on the floor. That puddle led to a bag which happened to belong to a bad student who used the opportunity to check his bag and clean up the mess as a chance to disrupt. He laid a chair down and used the back as a seat so that he didn’t have to sit on the floor. He made a couple trips to the restroom to rinse out the towel he was using to sop up the mess. He talked with the guy in his usual desk. (Note: I always move them to different chairs.)

I proceeded with the class without him and only lost a couple students to his distraction. He eventually got bored, finished and went back to his seat where he acted bored and annoyed at any requests that he actually speak/do work.

As for the sleeper, he surprised me by being a relatively decent student today. He not only didn’t try to sleep, but he actually did work and didn’t try to disrupt the class. Usually when sleepers are forced to stay awake they respond by being belligerent and doing nothing and doing to their best to make sure other students in the class do nothing.

The rest of the day went well, which is unusual for the day before a three day holiday. I had a few rowdy students and realized my planned schedule wasn’t going to work out exactly right (at least in one class).

Then it was home to enjoy doing very little for a few days.

The truth is, I’d be willing to pay money to make my work schedule a bit more difficult but that would actually make it easier.

To be more specific, one of the things I don’t like about my Monday schedule is I almost get it all over with and then have to wait. I teach first, second and third period with only the regular breaks and then all of a sudden it all comes screeching to a halt and I have little to do for the next three hours except some token planning and trying to keep myself entertained/awake.

This seems awesome, especially compared to the much more difficult schedule of teachers in the USA, but it has its drawbacks.

I personally would rather have all my classes in a row. In fact, I’ve volunteered to teach four hours in a row each school day if I could get them all done before lunch. This would allow me to be finished at lunch time and then all I’d need to do is take some time to plan the next day’s classes. I’d have more classes than I have now, but I wouldn’t be obligated to have to just sit around and get distracted by stuff in the office. (Or, in many cases, be the distraction.)

Note: We used to have a busier schedule at the school where I work but then the laws changed slightly and that caused our hours to be reduced to under 29.5 hours a week.

Note 2: This is a bit inside baseball/evil empire but, technically I am obligated to be at the school where I work for at least six hours each day for five days in a week which should add up to 30 hours. However, the five minutes of break I’m officially allotted do not count as part of the 30 hours which means I fall under the magical 29.5 hours “full time” voodoo level and am not eligible for full time benefits and salaries. 

Note 3: I was actually lucky to get some benefits the company I work for when I started at the school where I work. Confused? Welcome to Japan.

I suspect that once I settle in to the new schedule I’ll find ways to make my down time more productive. I’ll always wish, though, that I had more work and therefore more free time.

I normally don’t get mad at students during a first class, but one student was already pushing buttons. All he did was smile.

If today was a proper indication of what is to come then it appears that Friday is going to be the day that finally causes me to snap. The only good thing is that it’s now three classes spread out over five hours rather than four in a row broken up only by lunch.

The problem is it’s all junior high school. The first class went well even though it’s got a lot of students from my worst class. The Second also went well, even though it’s JHS 1st year. The main advantage I have with that class is that there homeroom teacher is right across the hall and can see in to my room through several large windows. At one point he watched my students give speeches even though there was no way he could hear what was being said.

My last class though, partly because it’s sixth period on Friday may prove to be my undoing. As I was explaining my seating chart and reminding them to remember their seats. a couple kids went “OKAY!” after every thing I said. Another kid was just smiling and nodding in a way that indicated he was, in fact listening, but wasn’t actually happy and didn’t actually care about what I was saying.

Those students are usually the most annoying as they are typically comedian’s in training and think they must do something funny every five minutes or they die. They also only listen to recognize you are talking so they can make a face. Five minutes later they ask their friends what is going on.

The main advantage I have is that the class is the last period on a Friday. This means I have all the time in the world to wipe smiles off of faces. (So to speak.)

My Thursdays at work will be best described as beginners, beginning to change and become too cool for school.

I started off with junior high school first year students today and this was kind of fun because I suspect I am teaching their first junior high school class. My job, at this point, is to both comfort and horrify. I speak slowly and as clearly as possible whilst maintaining a semblance of natural intonation and rhythm and then horrify with six simple words “I only speak English in class.”

Later I taught junior high school second year students. Most of them are in the transition form boys to young men. They are still tiny, but their voices are cracking and their attitudes are beginning to bleed through. At this age the standard response to anything difficult is laughter and a game with friends. Failing that, sleep is also considered an option.

During summer, most of them will hit their initial growth spurts and return unrecognizable.

The main goal at this point is to show them that both actions an inactions trigger reactions and homework. I also let them know that I’m willing to punish an entire class to get them to turn on one guy. Luckily this class is before the lunch break. This means I have all the time I need to make them rethink their actions.

After lunch I teach high school second year. No longer being the lowest students in the school, they feel mature enough to act childish. Oddly, the school where I work puts the lower class men on the uppermost floor and the upper class men on the lowermost floor. The junior high is the opposite meaning students rise and fall as they progress in school (something like that).

The class today was noisy but manageable and it has students I’ve had trouble with before. They all think they are too cool for my class, which means I may have to hand out some homework, which isn’t cool.

I only made two mistakes today, which is pretty good, even though both either did or will force changes.

Today was my first day in front of live students (as opposed to the imaginary evil ones that always seem to make my life hell even though they only exist in my anticipation/pessimism). Before class I did some kindergarten level art work with scissors, paste, a roll card and a student list.

The process begins with choosing the color of roll cards for each grade. There used to be inflexible rules controlling this but now the only rule seems to be “get all the good colors before everyone else uses them up”. I chose pink for my first year junior high school students, lavender for my second years, green for my third years, and blue for my second year high school.

That is followed by cutting out the name lists and pasting them on the cards.

For my first mistake I started using lavender for third years. I didn’t realize that until I made my second mistake. (More on that in a minute.)

The first class went well. The third year boys were loud but not defiant (at least not yet) and my brief television appearance on the news this morning  made me a minor celebrity among the few students who had seen it. (More on that in a future post.) That got me more street cred than I would normally have on the first day.

After work, I took my cards home with intent to finish making the cards. I pasted the remaining third year name lists onto blue cards and then set about finishing the rest. That’s when it hit me that I’d changed colors again. The official colors of third year junior high are now lavender and blue. Second year high school is lavender and second year junior high is green. I am resisting the urge to change the one lavender card to blue, but that’s only because I’m at home with no extra blue cards.

I did manage to type all the name lists into my score spreadsheet and probably fixed all the minor errors. However, after all the mistakes I made today, I’m sure I missed something major.

Today I was relieved that bad things were done to Julia and not to me. I realize this does not make me good person, but it did leave me more positive about the coming term than I expected to be.

One of our traditions at the school where I work, once we get our class rosters, is to read off the names of our most troublesome students from the year before so that we my both horrify the teachers who have them and mollify them with a few tricks we learned. We are a bit torn by this as it both prejudices us against the students and creates stress well before stress is required.

Last year at this time one of my colleagues looked at my class roster and started laughing a knowing laugh that revealed a surprising amount of pain and relief. I had been given, based on some past karmic deed apparently, all of his bad students from the year before. Even worse, they were all in one class. He was remembering the suffering and happy that the someone else would be suffering. That said, he was also horrified that all those students had been placed in one class.

Despite any fears of undue prejudice, that class quickly became my worst class. I figured I’d be getting most of them again as I figured the karmic debt was still due thus creating stress before any stress had actually been created (something like that).

Oddly, this year, although I have a few of the students from the bad class, I have none of the worst students. They’ve been split up between two teachers, but there are enough in each class to make each class a problem. The colleague who’d laughed the knowing laugh got all my worst students as karmic punishment for some past deed.

I, of course, felt relief that the students had been spread around to people who weren’t me.

This does not mean that things will be good, it just means that I can be positive until I actually get in front of students.

Being a substitute teacher is bad enough, being a permanent one is even worse.

On random Sundays I’m sometimes hired to serve as a substitute for teachers enjoying things like “days off” and/or “medical leave”. I find myself stuck in front of a room full of strangers who are suddenly faced with a strange face they don’t know and a voice they don’t understand.

Simon Rich, a former Saturday Night Live writer once pointed out that part of the reason new casts of the old show often seem terrible compared to the previous cast is that the audience doesn’t recognize their faces. This means they don’t understand how to react to their performances or their characters. However, once the audience gets used to them, the new members become old favorites until a new set of faces moves in. That new set of faces will always suck, until they are old faces.

The same thing happens with substitute teachers.

Part of teaching is the early dance with students as they test limits and you drag them back inside the limits. They are getting used to you and you to them. Eventually everyone knows the rules and, in the case of some classes, they ignore them completely, but in a way that’s predictable and controllable, or they follow them as necessary.

With substitutes, that dance happens in the middle of the term and because the relationship (so to speak) is temporary, no one invests much energy into it. Make the substitutes mad, go ahead, they’ll be gone soon enough. Smart substitutes recognize that, too. This too shall pass, and pretty damned quickly, too.

In my case, I took over not one, but two classes at the end of the year. I came in to substitute for one teacher and then a second left. This meant the two intermediate classes were combined and I got all the students. The second group were especially annoyed as they lost a much better, and much more handsome teacher and had to face a group of new student faces. The first day they were combined I had to force them to partner together as the Japanese group instinct took over.

I had substituted for both classes before, but not enough for them to get used to my face or me to theirs. They were good students, but we never quite finished the dance in the couple weeks we had. And now the music has stopped and it’s on to the next set of faces.

One of my odd skills as a teacher is that the less I prepare, the better I usually am at my job.

One of my former colleagues called this form of teaching the “golden doorknob method”. This means that as soon as you touch the doorknob and open the door, the lesson suddenly comes to you and you put on a lesson that’s one part improvisation and one part pure luck.

Part of the secret is to always act as if what you’re doing was always part of the plan. For example, on a couple occasions in the past, as a result of bad note taking, I’ve started to write a lesson on the board only to have a student point out that they’d already done that the class before.

My usual response is something resembling a smile followed by “I know. I’m just trying to scare you” (whilst hiding my shock and fear lest the students see the former and smell the latter). At that point I give the students a short assignment that keeps them busy long enough for me to scribble together a plan on whatever piece of paper happens to be available.

Other tricks I’ve learned, when I’m not sure what has gone before, involve an impromptu “book check” where I grab the textbooks of my better students and see which parts of the book had been completed in past classes.

The most difficult situations, oddly, often involve plans. Despite my advanced preparation, no matter how slowly I work through a lesson,it often happens that a class burns through everything and finishes all the work 20 minutes before the end of class. They then, in only five minutes, burn through the extra assignment brought in case they finished early.

You may remember, back when you were a student, how slowly the final five minutes of a class seemed to take. I assure you, fifteen minutes is a lot worse when you’re a teacher.

This even happened at the demo lesson I gave at the open house of the school where I work. My entire lesson was over with 20 minutes to spare and I made a big “I meant to do that” performance and had them turn the speeches they’d done into conversations with a partner. (Remember, there were parents watching all this.)

Of course, every now and then these skills fail. That’s when it’s time for a short rest and/or writing assignment.