Today’s post is a follow up to yesterday’s in which a teacher ate my students’ homework. Sort of.

In my classes at the school where I work one of my rules is that if I see work or books from other classes (including English classes) I give you a warning to put the stuff away and dock you a few points. If I see the stuff again I confiscate it and, if you are lucky and I’m in a good mood, I’ll hand it to your homeroom teacher to pass back to you at the end of the day. If I’m not in a good mood, which is more likely this time of year, I’ll keep the stuff until the next class.

What I never thought of doing, though, was confiscating the stuff and throwing it away. That is a level of hardcore teaching I can only aspire to. (Mostly because I don’t have anything even resembling tenure, unless momentum counts as tenure.)

What strikes me as odd about this situation is that the posters that were confiscated were of Fukui Prefecture which is not the kind of thing you’d expect teenage boys to be playing with in class. If the posters had been of, how shall I say, augmented scantily clad women, I can understand the posters ending up in the trash (especially since the teacher in question is married) but since they were obviously some sort of homework (unless there are some very, very odd fetishes of which I am unaware–call me if there are) throwing them out seemed very hardcore. (Granted, Fukui does kind of look like “Fuk U I” but not to a Japanese.)

I suspect a number of warnings were involved, and since I’ve had issues with these two students myself I can imagine they didn’t actually listen to the warnings and that the teacher finally went past discipline to vengeance.

Either way, I now have a new threat: “If you don’t put that away, I’ll dispose of it like I’m a math teacher.”

No, that will take too long to explain. I’ll just take it and threaten to throw it away.

Well, maybe NOW I’ve seen it all.

For various complicated reasons involving the calendar, the second term at the school where I work is longer than the first. It feels shorter, though, because it has more, and better placed, days off. However, the end of the second term is also the time for lobbying and, this year, for odd things to happen.

Lobbying:
The lobbying occurs because high school third year students (12th graders) are finishing their classes, sort of, and finding out if they will graduate with a good enough score to get automatic recommendation to the affiliated university. Because of this, their classes end early and they have exams whilst we are still teaching other grades.

My one student suddenly became worried about his final mark during the last class and began a near epic lobbying campaign with all his foreign teachers. (I’m guessing he lobbied all his teachers, but I only have evidence of him lobbying us). I told him that the end of the school year is a little late to worry about his score and then told him what mark he needed on the final exam to get a “9” (81-90%). He earned the score with room to spare. I then had to spend the better part of an hour babysitting him at a test pass back until I could let him go.

He also announced that he would not be attending our one class together next term. (Note: the HS 3’s are finished and will receive no more grades yet they are scheduled for classes next term; however, if they don’t show up, there is no actual consequence except I get to sleep in or not.)

Oddities:
The odd thing happened yesterday, when two of my more troublesome students explained that they couldn’t do their final presentations because “A teacher ate our homework”. Actually, it turned out they meant “A teacher stole our posters.” As near as I can tell, they were practicing for my class during their math class–note: English requires a higher final average than other classes for automatic recommendation–and their math teacher confiscated the visual aids they were going to use for the Sell a Prefecture TV commercial.

After class, I led them down to the teachers’ room where they managed to track down the math teacher in question. They explained the situation and he looked confused, dumbfounded and then horrified. He explained he’d thrown the posters away. He then dug in the trash and, much to the relief of the students and my stifled, therefore painful snickers, he found the posters and the students were able to complete the assignment.

Of course, the tablet I was using as my timer ran out of battery right as they were finishing so I don’t know if they actually met the time limit yet or not.

Normally I’d torture them a bit by threatening to make them go again. However, since they’d shown me an event I’d never seen in 26 years of teaching, I decided not to torture them. This time.

One of my more troublesome students made monkey noises and beat his desk earlier this week when I reminded him he had two speeches to do next class. Today (the next class) he didn’t do the speeches which means he fails the term. My problem is, he’s already failed the term based on absences so there’s not much I can do.

Today was the last day before the last week of classes begin which means it’s an odd time at the school where I work. It’s the last day when clubs will meet and the last day when we can, technically, keep students after school.

The problem is by this point in the term we really couldn’t care less. We are making exams and walking the fine line between punishing bad students by making the exams difficult–I once told a teacher “if one of us foreign staff can pass this exam, it’s too easy”–even if it means hurting good students, or writing off the bad students and hoping they don’t do well on the exams so that the good students can do well on the exams.

This is also the time of the lobbyist. Third year high school students (12th graders) have already finished classes and are in exams. This allows extra time for them to take make-up exams if they fail. It’s also the time when they suddenly realize what final marks they need vs what they’ve earned and they start lobbying for higher grades.

In my case, I told my student what score he needed and told him everything he needed to know to get that score. I’m not sure he gets that I will give him a low score if he doesn’t do well. Granted, his score will still be pretty good, just not as good as someone who’s lived overseas was expecting. As I always point out, though: 1) I’ve failed returnees before. 2) am not afraid to meet parents to discuss grades and 3) the last week of school is not a particularly good time to worry about your marks.

Now I have a couple days to relax before the flood hits, or as the French say apres le weekend le deluge (something like that).

If you can’t experiment on your students, there isn’t much fun in teaching.

Every now and then I have a class that has a lot of extra classes. Normally, if I have three classes, they tend to meet the same number of times. For example, Class One might meet 22 times, Class Two 22 times and Class Three 24 times. Class Three gets some extra English, which they don’t always appreciate, but a couple classes isn’t that difficult to manage.

However, once every few years the timing of holidays and school function days result in a larger difference in classes. For example, a couple years ago, I had a class that met 7 times during the winter term and another in the same grade that met 13 times. This meant the second class got almost twice as much English as the first class.

Because of that extra time, I decided to experiment on the longer class by having them make a TV commercial. They had to create a new product, a visual aid and a 60 second commercial. It was a bit of mad scientist experimentation but it turned out well enough that I ended up stealing the idea for higher grade a couple years later.

This year, in my first year high school class (US 10th grade) a couple of the classes are meeting four times more than the third class. I’ve therefore decided to put on my mad scientist hat and experiment on them.

This term, the plan is for them to make a two minute commercial advertising a lesser known prefecture (the Japanese version of a state). They have to research the prefecture and make a poster/advertisement for it.

The most fun happened at the beginning: after they formed pairs, each pair sent a student to draw a prefecture. When the first pair got a prefecture that isn’t very interesting there was a lot of excitement for every drawing after that. It was mostly interesting to see which prefectures where considered cool and which ones were considered horrible.

Unfortunately, that’s probably the end of the fun, but that’s part of the experiment.

One of my students today had a hard time finding a partner. He wandered around trying to find one and, because the class has an odd number of students, ended up by himself. When I finally assigned him a group, everyone laughed at the student who would be his partner.

I also may have made a mistake.

What’s odd about what happened today is that I had just explained that 1) this was a major project and 2) because it was major everyone needed to choose their partner carefully because 3) both partners would receive the same score. If one was good and one was bad, they’d both get the bad score.

What’s really odd is that the guy who couldn’t get a partner is one of my best students. Usually, it’s the bad students who can’t get partners and they end up in pairs with other bad students or made to participate in forced partnerships at my request/angry insistence.

This student is also a hard worker and it will be easy for his partners to be lazy whilst they only pretend to be busy. He also tends to dominate the speaking parts, which also makes it easier for his partners. Also, with three partners, each partner has less to memorize.

The rest of the class was unimpressed.

Part of the problem, and I realize this is ugly, is that the good student has an air of “kick me” about him. He is skinny and has slightly bushy hair and he reminds me of a fellow student who used to get bullied back in my Hayden, Colorado days. That student also gave off a “kick me” vibe that many people were more than happy to exploit.

I’m hoping that the problem really is that this student tends to volunteer to go first when I ask for volunteers. This usually produces angry reactions from his partners, even when I point out they get bonus points for going early.

My mistake, though, may have been choosing the pair at random and then letting randomness make the choice. The good student is now with one of my worst students–who 1) plays American style football; 2) happens to be almost as tall as I am and 3) is one of a handful of students I believe should never have been allowed into the high school. He’s never going to take the assignment seriously (he tends to try to improvise by putting on a comedy routine) and I’m afraid the last laugh will be on my good student.

In the end, I’ll probably have to let the good student work by himself and watch the other guy and his partner fail. That said, the third partner was absent today. I’ll have to see his reaction before I make any decisions.

There is an odd thing that happens to some students when they enter the mid point of their high school careers: The reasoning parts of their brains shutdown leaving in operation only the parts necessary to maintain basic physical functions.

This usually manifests itself as attitude and excuses.

Today, a student I’ve mentioned before (the one who gave me the “Penis Man” superhero) arrived to class five minutes late. He then put his head down and made ready to take a nap.

I went over and woke him up and reminded him of the rules: if you want to sleep, you may leave the classroom and go sleep. He then told me that the reason he wasn’t working was that he’d lost his paper. This, to the teenage mind, is a logical excuse. He lost the paper and therefore he now has free time.

I told him to get a notebook and copy the questions from someone else, as three other students had already done. I also reminded him he hadn’t done his superhero speech yet and should work on that. He said “okay” which is Japanese high school boy for “fuck you” and then did his best to try to sleep sitting up.

When I reminded him he needed to hurry because if he didn’t do the superhero and supervillain speeches he couldn’t do the final project (which requires the two characters) and then he’d fail the term and, almost certainly, they year.

He said in Japanese “I don’t understand English. Har har har.” Which is Japanese high school boy for “I don’t understand you which means you’re stupid. Har har har.” Again, to the teenage mind, this makes logical sense.

I told him it was too bad he’d lost his papers because he’d need them next year if I was in charge of the grade. He said “I don’t understand English. Har har har.”

I said “I know” and failed him for the day. He never did get a chance to sleep.

The big problem with coming back after Autumn break is that you’ve lost all rhythm to your work. The problem is made worse when you’ve had an October with lots of starts and stops. The problem is even worser when you’re only back for one day after a long break.

It’s as if your vacation has suddenly been interrupted by someone calling you back to work for an emergency.

I complicated it by  adding a new part-time job. This isn’t usually that big of a problem except this job has me walking in the door at 11:35 p.m. That left me feeling somewhere between “spritely” and “zombie” (with more slant toward zombie). I wasn’t that tired and I didn’t get cranky but I wasn’t 100%.

Luckily, neither were my students. They seemed surprised to be back (and they have class tomorrow) and were, at best 50%.

They got work done, but my last class, which featured a role play about the two partners meeting in 2035 for the first time in 20 years, was treated as optional by a few groups of students. I pointed out that it was not actually optional but it didn’t have my usual force, even when I suggested a couple students keep their textbooks because they’d need them next year when they repeated the class.

(Note: the school where I work will allow high school students to fail and force them to repeat the year or transfer to a new school.)

I quietly gave zeroes, which is unusual as zeroes usually arrive with force and noise, and I’m not sure the students who got zeroes fully appreciated that they were getting zeroes.

This means that next class about five pairs will have to perform their role plays or get zeroes for a second day in a row. I hope I can be louder next time, but we’ll see. The next class is on a Wednesday, which is the day after my part time job so I have my doubts about how high my energy level will be, at least until I get used to the new class rhythm.

Or, if things go horribly off kilter, I may only give zeroes for people who wake me up during class.

I hadn’t intended to write about this topic again, but my students made me do it.

In the same class where students got extra homework earlier this week, two of the same boys decided that sleep was more important than 1) listening to what I was saying and 2) doing the assignment I gave them. It’s as if my giving them homework and them completing it earlier this week somehow gave them a pass for any bad actions they did the rest of the week.

The funny part, and more proof of the Vortex of Suck, is that they put their heads down at the same time. After I woke them up, they had a glazed, zombie look in their eyes until I started to explain the assignment. At that point, they put their heads down and went to sleep. I stopped explaining the assignment, woke them up and gave them a choice: do the work or leave the room and go off and sleep together. (Something like that.) I also told them they should save their textbooks because they would most likely need them again next year.

They opted to “not sleep” which is different than “be awake”. They didn’t work and I had to warn their partners in Suck that they shouldn’t talk to them lest they face consequences again.

What surprised me was the attitude the pair expressed. They acted as if they were somehow smarter than I was and that somehow I wouldn’t chase them down and make them do work as I had just done earlier in the week. Perhaps because there is a short break coming up they were thinking that I might forget about them over the break. (Actual answer: teenagers.)

Next Friday I’ll see them again and we’ll find out if the attitude is still there. I’m pretty sure it will be which means my attitude will go to 9 or 10 (for the record: it goes to 11) and they’ll get extra work. They’ll also get new seats up by me.