Category Archives: Teaching

You Can Stay But You Must Go Now

Well, the devil over my right shoulder won the day and I did a good job in my demo classes today. Well, at least I did in one of them.

The first thing that surprised me, and actually put my mind at ease, was that the parents visiting the open campus were dressed as if they were going to a picnic. So were a lot of the students. On parents days during the year the parents dress up and I very often have to avert my eyes as the mothers seem to get younger and younger each year whilst I stay the same age. (Something like that. I’ve been 24 or 25 for at least five years.)

I also noticed that the turn out for high school classes like mine were much smaller than for junior high classes. This is because 1) it’s easier to get into the junior high school (requirements: Japanese and breathing) and 2) once you’re in the junior high it’s easier to get into high school.

Because there wasn’t much pressure, I relaxed. However, me being me, I immediately started changing the plan while I was standing in front of the class. This involved drawing a picture that represented fear of heights on the board and adding the words “collecting pens” to indicate my hobby (at least for today; I also told them I was 24) and added “#1 Fear”.

For the first class, when everyone, myself included, was fresh and energetic, I was able to sell all those and get a reaction when I pointed out the number one fear was “giving speeches” and that’s exactly what they were about to do. I then got a series of good speeches that ended about 10 minutes before I expected them to, which was 15 minutes before the end of class. I then went into actor improv mode and pointed out that the back of the speech paper was blank and, as a teacher, “I hate blank pages” and had them make pairs and write short conversation based on the speech.

I also noticed that one of my students was also a pen and pencil collector. He had, based on my quick observations a Pilot S20 mechanical pencil; a Lime Green Lamy Safari, a black Rotring Rapid Pro mechanical pencil and several other pens all tightly packed in a Lihit Lab Teffa pen case.

(Note: this means he’s not allowed to attend school where I work. He’s not allowed to have cooler pens and pencils than I do.)

The class went so well I knew the second class, the one after lunch, would be bad.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. The vibe was a lot different and the students weren’t as energetic. Once again it finished early and I assigned a conversation. Although some students asked for help, others just sat there staring at each other wondering what to do. I authorized my Japanese assistant (long story) to act as a human electronic dictionary and answer their questions.

No one had any cool pens though. I even had to loan one guy my Rotring 600 mechanical pencil because he hadn’t thought to bring any pens or pencils.

Unfortunately for him he gave it back rather than trying to steal it. That means he can’t come to the school either.

The Pencil Marks the Spot

The school where I work still enters final marks on optical character recognition sheets. This isn’t as old school as it gets (we could be using Hollerith code) but it is rather old school and it also requires a certain amount of penmanship. This is where a lot of people get in trouble.

First some background: The OCR process involves filling in the OCRs with pencil, turning them in at a specific time and then waiting whilst the secretive people in the secretive old school computer room scan the cards and make a print out. We then checked the scores (on continuous form dot matrix paper from a dot matrix printer) and, if there were any mistakes, we waited whilst the corrections were made and reprinted. My first year at the school we turned in the cards around one in the afternoon and didn’t see the results until around five-thirty. I even had to call She Who Must Be Obeyed and delay our night out.

This slow process apparently scared some people because a couple years later we had an intranet system and a program we could access from our desks. The problem was the program wasn’t particularly intuitive (it had complicated steps to get to the complicated steps) and there were lots of complaints. Then the company went bankrupt and we were back to OCR cards.

Apparently, though, a deal was struck to speed up the process and now the turnaround time is usually an hour. Mistakes are taken care of quickly, too. The biggest mistakes usually involve 8s and 7s which can look like 0s or Bs or 1s. (Well, there was also that year I entered marks from the wrong row but that’s another post.) It helps to keep your pencils as sharp as possible, even if you have to resharpen them during the writing process.

My biggest complaint about the current system, though, is that you can’t submit early. With the unintuitive program we could finish everything the night before final marks were due and run away early. With the OCRs we can submit at any time, but the secretive computer people won’t fire up the OCR machine and scan them early.

My other complaint is that the dot matrix paper isn’t the classic green and white style. If you’re going retro, go full retro.

Now You Know Me and What I Am

The tenth graders at the school where I work are funny people. They are in their first year of high school and as they approach their first final exam in my class, they get, well, kind of funny.

For lots of complicated reasons the classes I teach don’t have mid-term exams. This creates a couple problems for me. First, because they haven’t had a major exam in my class but have had them in others, the students tend to not take my final exam seriously. This is a bad problem for them to have because they need a higher percentage in their English classes in order to get automatic recommendation for university than they do in all their other classes. However, because there’s been no big exams, they don’t act as if the coming exam is important.

Second, because they’ve usually just finished a major final project, they often act as if there’s nothing left to do in class. My job, then, is to remind them that they are wrong.

That was an issue this week with a couple of my classes that, for various complicated reasons, have had lots of extra class time. In such cases I usually offer a deal: if they study my class on the next to last class, I will look the other way at what they are studying on the last class. They should study my class, but I won’t look too closely at what they are doing.

However, if they play or waste time, I take that as meaning they want to study my class on the last day and I prepare a review lesson. It’s at this point that they start trying to test me. I had students laugh at me as if I were joking when I told them I’d give them work on the last day. I had students mock what I was saying by repeating it and laughing. When I pointed out that two guys who were supposed to be studying together had their textbooks open to different units (with one book open to a unit we didn’t study) they just ignored me.

This is partly because many of my students didn’t go to junior high at the school where I work so they don’t know much about me. Those that did are used to my English classes not having much meaning but they should also know that I never bluff (well, almost never).

At the end of the classes, I told them that because too many of them hadn’t studied, i planned to bring something for them to study. Most ignored me.

Then, today, I handed out a work sheet that involved writing a couple hundred words.

Suddenly I had their attention.

One student reminded me that I’d said there’d be free study. I reminded him that I’d said that not enough people had studied and that I’d bring an assignment. However, when he finished the assignment, I wouldn’t look at what he was studying.

They were all annoyed but they were quiet as they finished the assignment. After they finished I checked their answers with them which also kept them from having any free study time.

If this goes like normal, this will be the last time I have this problem with these students.

 

This Year the Stress is Not Mine

I’ve written before about how this time last year I was stressed because I’d decided to change things and was waiting for them to fall apart.

This year, though, the stress isn’t mine.

Once again we decided to have our students film two minute “television” commercials for original inventions as their final project. This process involves first screening the inventions to make sure 1) the inventions aren’t just modifications of an existing product (in other words, no “These totally aren’t Google glasses” glasses or iPhone 12s) and 2) the inventions don’t already exist. For example, a couple of my students tried to use “Memory Bread” but I said they couldn’t use it because Doraemon already had some.

The students then had a chance to prepare their scripts and visual aids and polish their presentations.

This week, though, I started filming. Unlike last year, I’ve made friends with one of the computer lab teachers as they also serve as the “Keepers of the Cameras”. This means I’ve already got cameras and tripods reserved which removed a lot stress. I’ve even moved an entire class of students to make it easier to access the few open rooms we need for filming.

The new teachers are feeling the stress a bit more, as are the students as we’ve emphasized that they will fail if they don’t do a good job.

Last year several students taped their scripts to the backs of their posters. Because I didn’t have time to have them do their videos again, I let them get away with it. This year, though, because I have more time, I let them finish their commercials and then tell them they have to do it again.

Today’s only glitch was that I had students misunderstand my instructions. I told them I’d give them two takes to do their commercials. I meant that they could stop once and start again. They interpreted it to mean they could do a crap job today and get a second chance.

Once I corrected this misunderstanding, the performances suddenly improved and a couple pairs hurried back to finish.

I just relaxed and let them do their work.

 

 

The Sacrificial Lamb Faces the Sacrifice

Today I got to watch a person who was showing physical signs of stress try to wave the company’s flag for a few hours.

I’ve written before how the company I work for likes to send observer’s at the worst possible times. Today our observer arrived and we were shocked by a couple things.

First, it was only one guy. Usually we get two visitors, one foreigner with no real authority and one Japanese with slightly more authority. I do not know if that means the school where I work only gave permission for one visitor or if this was a case of symbolism over usefulness. (i.e. I’m here to show the flag and pretend I’m here to critique these people who’ve been teaching almost as long as I’ve been alive.)

 

Second, the observer looked stressed and even had physical symptoms of stress. We do not know if this is because of the less than friendly greeting I gave them this time last year or if there are other things going on behind the scenes (or both). Either way, we usually treat the foreign observers well because they don’t have much more authority than we do so I don’t think it had anything to do with us.

Third, the observer only stayed a few hours. Mind you, this is not a problem as nothing cramps your style more than having “the man” hovering over you at all hours, but usually, to make the trip worth his time, the observer stays longer than a couple hours. The goal is to get a feel for working conditions. (Which got worse as some “genius” at the school decided to lock the air conditioners at a surprisingly warm level. This may have driven the observer away, too.)

Then again, I like to think the observer was scheduled to be there all day but decided to take the afternoon off.

I hope that’s what he was doing.

 

Periodic Fits of Competence

Occasionally I’m pretty good at my job. Unfortunately, it usually happens by accident.

For example, the other day I told a student to lie to me and it went so well I’ll probably have more students lie to me. Before class I’d prepared an article that listed ways to tell if a person was lying. I then had the student read a monologue twice. Once as he’d prepared it and once using all the lying tells. It went well and I think I’ll keep that for the future. Probably.

Back a thousand years ago when I first started teaching as a graduate student I was observed by my then boss. All I remember is the students were supposed to read three essays, one of which was by a fundamentalist Christian. As the students discussed the essays with me, I suddenly felt compelled put a chart on the board that summarized the various assumptions motivating the three writers. In his follow up comments, my then boss told me the chart was effective, but that I didn’t finish filling it out.

I think I used the chart again, but knowing me, I probably forgot about it. Teaching is like acting. Despite your preparation, there’s a lot of improvisation and that makes it easy to forget things you did the next time you would be able to do them. Also, things that worked brilliantly with one class will flop with another and you have to do more improvisation.

For example, after I started working at the school where I work, I used to make my junior high students make practice tests for their partners as a form of exam review. After 30 minutes or so they exchanged and took each other’s tests. This worked well for a few years until we got a group of students I dubbed “The Demon Seed Class”. They played rather than making the practice exams and I abandoned the entire activity at the end of that year and started giving them writing practice.

Sometimes, I only got one chance to do a trick. When I was at Ole Miss, I managed to get one of the coveted Introduction to Literature courses. (Explaining why these were coveted would require another post.) At some point I assigned Hamlet which is the happy play where a depressed Dane manages to kill the entire Danish Royal Court by pretty much being too afraid to kill one guy. I remember at one point putting all the characters on the board and eliciting a complete list of who loved who, who was related to who, and who wanted to kill who. I also remember being told it helped clarify some of the parts of the play.

For some reason, when I got to class on the day we were set to finish the play, I suddenly changed plans. Instead of the quiz I’d prepared, I gave the students only one question: “List everyone who’s dead at the end of Hamlet.” Now, I grant you, given that Hamlet has a pretty high body count, you can almost list any character and have a good chance of getting points but the students had fun and they still had to know the characters.

The next year I was in Japan and I never had a chance to teach Hamlet again. To rephrase Uncle Monty from Withnail and I: “It is the most shattering experience of a young teacher’s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will probably never teach the Dane again’.” Something like that.

All The Bad Suzukis

The odds against people named Suzuki are not good, at least in the classes I teach. In my experience, at least at the school where I work, the odds of a Suzuki being bad are pretty high.

Now, I’ll grant you that this may be a math problem. Suzuki is the second most common name in Japan therefore the odds of encountering a Suzuki are high and given the normal distribution of good and bad then, well, um, no, that doesn’t explain the past at all.

About a decade ago I taught a class that had four lads named Suzuki in it. They were all bad. (Given the normal distribution of good and bad then at least one should have been good.) What was funny about them was they were all bad in different ways. Suzuki A (not his real name) was lazy and had to be coaxed into doing work. Suzuki B was noisy and had to be stapled to his chair (metaphorically, of course; the school wouldn’t buy me a stapler that large); Suzuki C was distracted by games and work from other classes and, if he had a book, it wasn’t from my class; and Suzuki D was all of the above forms of bad plus a few more.

While I was teaching the Four Bad Suzukis of the Apocalypse, we had an open class where other teachers could observe our classes. A young teacher observed my class.

Unfortunately on that particular day, Suzuki D’s usual partner was absent and he felt this meant he had the day off. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms and fell asleep. I woke him up and told him to get a partner. He pointed to the empty chair, mumbled something and went back to sleep.

I woke him up again and he pointed to the empty chair again and once again mumbled something and went back to sleep again.

I woke him a third time and pointed to another lad who had no partner and Suzuki D mumbled something and went back to sleep.

I woke him up fourth time. This time he threw his arms out and shouted “nani?!” (Which usually means “what” but given his tone, was Japanese for “now what the fuck do you want/will you fuck off”) I told him to get out and he left without much more coaxing than that.

The young teacher was both horrified and impressed and, because Suzuki D was well known there were no repercussions. I don’t know what happened to him. I vaguely remember him not passing the year, but that might be my imagination.

Now, when I have students named Suzuki I ask them “are you a good Suzuki or a bad Suzuki”? They usually say good. I’m not sure I believe them. You are Suzuki until proven innocent.

Once More into the Brats

No, this post is not a repeat of last week’s post on the same subject; rather it’s a post on the similar events as happened last week.

Today we got rain and that means the weather’s about to turn hot and the changing weather and air pressure is messing with lots of people’s heads. I got to school mostly soaked and in a bad mood.

That was the perfect setting for teaching my worst class.

Once again, they started off with the “Jason’s” and this time were more persistent about it. Once again I ignored them and went on with the class.

Things went reasonably well after that until I checked answers by having students stand up. (If you answer you get to sit down and last brat standing starts the next row). At one point, three students decided to play a game by refusing to answer. One guy even turned away. This not being my first rodeo, so to speak, I made three rows stand up which suddenly inspired faster response times.

Towards the end of the activity, a different group of three brats decided to try the same game. This time I just let them stand. I told them I had no problem making them stand until the end of class. (I stand for hours a day as part of my job so half a class is no big deal for me, but it’s torture to them.) One of the brats then tried to lead the class in the “We Will Rock You” beat. I let them do it and started working on my notes for my next class which stopped the music (although they tried it a couple more times).

When they finally realized they couldn’t out-stubborn me or piss me off enough to yell, they answered questions and got to sit down. (Note: the ring-leaders did this to their teacher last year, too.)

Their final gimmick was to refuse to memorize the conversation I told them to memorize. They took great joy in getting help or blatantly reading from the book. In this case the joke was on them, though, as I actually got all but one of them to perform the conversation, which they wouldn’t have done unless they thought they were making a game of it. (See, I know a few tricks.) Everyone who read (which was all but two pairs) earned a zero for the day but at least they spoke English.

One boy in a group of three didn’t perform the conversation as both his partner’s refused to go twice. I told them to come in at lunch (flash forward: they didn’t, but I’ll get them.)

As I left the room, I heard someone say “Fuck you” (Remember, the school where I work is nominally a Christian school). The good news is the homeroom teacher is on my side. I told him to warn them that if I hear another “fuck you” I’ll keep the class after school every night until final exams. It’ll be my own little English club as they write “fuck you” 10,000 times or spell all the numbers from one to ten-thousand.

If they think I’m joking, well, I’ll be the only one laughing. I do this kind of stuff for sport.

Mothers and Fathers and Embarrassing Greetings

To rephrase a famous line from Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I like about these mothers, man. I get older; they stay the same age.”

Today was parent’s day at the school where I work which means 1) I wore a tie and 2) parents were free to wander in and out of classes at their whim and 3) many students suddenly denied three times that they even knew their parents. (When that happened several years ago, the mother, who spoke excellent English, promised, in so many words, that her son would be punished.)

One of the things I’ve noticed over my years as a teacher (approaching 26 years, in various forms) is that because my students are always the same ages, their parents are usually about the same ages. Seventh grade parents are in their early to mid-30s and 10th grade parents are in their mid-30’s . The problem is, every year they seem to look a bit younger than they are.

It’s the same reaction you have when you see high school kids and junior high kids and 1) realize how young they are and 2) remember how old you used to feel when you were their age. (You, of course, were a lot smarter than these kids. These kids are morons.)

Complicating matters, the mothers tend to dress up and do their hair and make-up perfectly as a part of parent’s day is putting on a show for other parents. This also makes them look younger than they are.

I only had a few visitors, one of whom may have been a homeroom teacher, because the biggest turnout happens on Saturday.

Occasionally fathers show up on a weekday, but that can be a mixed blessing. Today a father committed the ultimate sin. He came into class and after a minute of resistance, walked over and spoke to his son. The other students reacted with uncomfortable laughs and I felt sorry for them both. The father stayed for most of the lesson, even during the part where students wrote conversations. But then, after a while he seemed to get bored and left for a while.

It was during this absence that his son pounced, so to speak. One of my rules is that if you perform your memorized conversation on the day of the assignment you get bonus points. As soon at the coast was clear and the father gone, the son volunteered to do the conversation (his partner wasn’t as happy but did a good job).

I understand why the son did this, but kind of wish his father had been there. It would have made him happy and made him think more positive thoughts about me (the parents are allowed to officially evaluate us). Instead I announced those who already had bonus points to let him know he’d missed something by stepping out.

On the other hand, by embarrassing his son like that, he probably deserved to be punished a little.

Next year I’ll do it all again, but the mothers will be even younger.

 

The Difference Between Bad and Worst

Today I taught a class that’s the same level as my worst class. Unlike my worst class, though, they are bad in a better way.

First some history: A few years ago, the school where I work changed the way it divides junior high school English Conversation classes. It added an extra section to the grade to make class sizes smaller, then divided the classes with the “S” class having 20 students and the lower level “R” class having 14. The idea was that 14 students would be easier to control than a larger class. (Note: the classes used to be divided more evenly with about 17-21 in the lower level class and, yes, 14 are a lot easier to control than even 17.)

Because the “R” classes are lower level, and because no one can fail, they are often rowdier than the “S” classes and usually more trouble. The worse they are, the more likely they are to get a nickname: Class 2A (Second grade, A class) becomes “2 Awful”; 2B becomes “2 Bad”, etc. (Note: the others are “2 Crappy,” “2 Damned/Dammit,” “2 Evil” and “2 F@#ked”.)

Today’s class was loud and the students have a typical “I don’t understand, therefore I now have free time” attitude but they actually listened and actually did work (most of them). It was only in the last 10 minutes or so that things began to collapse. Some gave up; some finished and started playing; everyone was talking; no one was working. This is typical of an “R” class. I’ve always maintained that if “R” classes were 40 minutes long they’d be great; unfortunately they are 50 minutes long.

Also unfortunately, my worst class tends to skip the first 40 minutes and starts well after the collapse and goes downhill from there. Those classes tend to get lots of worksheets and they often make me recite the mantra (it’s only 50 minutes, it’s only 50 minutes) and start counting how many more times I will have to see them.

The better bad classes, though, tend to be more fun to work with and they often surprise you. Today a student who got in trouble stayed into lunch to help another student finish his writing assignment.

This class doesn’t have a nickname yet, but it’s still early in the year.