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.

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.