Went I entered class, I had two and a half students.

I spent the better part of today down in Tokyo teaching students who hope to go to the USA to study. I’ve done this off and on for several years and I especially like the workshop days because 1) the are longer so there’s some extra money and 2) I don’t have to do any of the planning or prep work.

However, when I arrived in class, I knew I’d have to do some quick improvising. Two young women were awake while a third had her head down on the desk. She was fast asleep. As I got ready to wake her up (with the scariest sounding alarm on my phone) a fourth student came in. That didn’t help me much, but talking to him woke up the third young woman.

The problem is that the course is designed for 18 people. Giving 18 students their work, checking their work and then having them present their work would take a good part of the day. With only four students, I’d have to improvise a lot because they’d finish in almost no time.

Even the opening activity “Find Someone Who” would go quickly with only four students. I quickly wormed my way into a larger class for the warm up and by then a couple more students had arrived.

Over the course of morning, a few more students arrived. One arrived during a writing assignment and did nothing because that was easier than having me explain (once again) what he was supposed to do.

Two young women who arrived late immediately started acting bored. Their English was pretty good but I had to threaten to send them out a couple times for speaking Japanese and for talking when I was talking.

Over time, they faded to a level below boredom and I’m sure the last half hour was brutal for them. They even wanted to play games and were annoyed when I said no because the games wouldn’t help them pass their TOEIC or TOEFL.

This argument did not impress them.

At the end of the day, we were all ready to get out. I’ll see them again in a month. At least I’ll be in the building. I don’t know if I’ll see the same students. If I do, I hope they arrive on time and bring some energy.

Even the non-believers at the school where I work are praying tonight. Well, at least those of us on the native speaker staff are.

If tomorrow is sunny and beautiful, the students will head to a nearby lake where they will run a 10 kilometer (6.3ish mile) “marathon”. While they are doing this, we, the native speakers, will be doing such useful, scholarly things as “going to the bank”, “playing World of Tanks” and “recovering from hangover”.

This is because there is nothing for us to do on marathon day. I’ll be working on my final exam/playing World of Tanks whilst my students run in the wind and the cold.

If, however, it is rainy and/or snowy, the marathon will be cancelled and classes will be reinstated and we’ll have to rush to school to teach.

The latter has happened quite a few times. My first year at the school where I work, it was a beautiful sunny day everywhere but the actual marathon site. As I went about wasting time and conspicuously consuming, I got a call telling me marathon had been cancelled and I had to go to work. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the school, my classes would have been finished.

I ended up getting the day off, but I felt bad about it all day.

A few years ago we got two major snow storms a week apart and that left the marathon site messy and dangerous  and we ended up having class.

Although we can guess, based on the weather predictions, if the marathon will be a go or not, we still have to be up early to monitor the school website to learn if there’s a change of schedule. If there is, we start working the phones and rush to school.

I’ll be up early waiting for the official notice. If nothing changes, I might go back to bed.

We all showed up, today, but none of us were really there.

One of the quirks of the school where I work is we have lots of odd days with little to do because of entrance exams. Because of this, when we finally have something to do, it’s often been so long since we had to do it that we forget how it was done.

Throw in illness and a migraine hangover, and you’ve got recipe for zombies.

One of us had a toothache and was popping pain killers which left him less than 100%. Others were losing energy as they encountered students who either had too much energy or, more likely, too little. As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but no matter how many times you it with a stun gun, you can make it drink (something like that).

In my case I was nursing a migraine hangover. (I got the migraine aura right before supper last night. The spot was in my left eye which usually means a brutal one is coming.) I thought I was fine until I got to class and could feel the leftover hint of nausea and the leftover hint of migraine at the side of my head. The effect of this was to make me cranky in a “shut the f@#k up” kind of way.

It didn’t help that in my second class, seven of nine speeches had to go again, including five people who were already going again. Then, despite it having been translated for them, they pretended they didn’t understand that they had to go again in the same class. This led to more crankiness in a “What are you people? On dope?” kind of way.

At the end of the day, even though today was the only full day of the week, we were all like the walking dead. We were walking slowly; we were hungry; and we all needed a brain.

Oh, and in a follow up from yesterday’s post: I didn’t get approved for the credit card. 

I’m not sure what to think about what happened in class today.

Nothing happened, and that has me a bit worried.

As a rule, when I start the new year, even though it’s not a new school year, I tend to approach each class as a new start. Well, not with my worst class, I expect them to be bad.

Today they weren’t, but the so-called “higher level” half of them were and I’m not sure what that means.

It could be that because my expectations were so low for them, I abandoned any pretense of trying to do anything fun. My colleague had plans for games and sundry activities. I started with a plan to do an activity (albeit not a fun one) and then changed plans and did something a lot simpler.

The students were reasonably quiet and did the work. Granted, for some of them “doing the work” means waiting until someone smarter finishes and then copying their paper. They did this today even though the answers were supposed to come via an interview which makes it look like a lot of my students are actually the same person with different faces. (This actually explains a lot.)

Because I came in with low expectations I was worried when it appeared as if they would all finish sooner than I expected, which meant some of them would never finish. Luckily, their natural distraction took over and the worst students slowed down.

They did spend most of the class testing me, though. One refused to stand at first during the warm up; one started using bad Japanese words until he realized I understood and then he stopped; one tried calling me “Mr. Jason” which is their old nickname for me; the one who refused to stand up thought he’d get away without showing his print. Then he seemed to remember what happened the last time he tried that and quickly copied someone else’s answers (adding yet another face to the one student).

As classes with my worst class go, it wasn’t a bad day. My colleague, though, had lots of trouble. Her students wouldn’t listen to the game rules and she didn’t finish everything she’d planned. It’s an odd day in deed when I’m happy with my class and she’s not.

I’d tell their homeroom teacher about how good they were, but they’d just be terrible the next time.

I’m trying to plan for what’s coming, but I’m not sure it will help.

I’ve written before how the third term at the school where I work is kind of crazy. There are odd days and cancelled days and every grade ends at different times. Some classes never seem to end, and those are almost always my worst classes because “karma” and “bitch”.

This term my one student in my high school third year class has already informed me he won’t be attending his one class. I’ll have to show up for work anyway as I have a class later in the afternoon, but part of me is already planning what to do with that time. I’m pretty sure I’ll show up earlier than I have to, just not at the usual time.

What I do when I get there I do not know.

At the end of February, high school first and second years end early and start exams. A couple days after that junior high school third years end and start exams. At some point, we are marking exams and passing them back whilst we are still teaching grades that haven’t ended. Then, when we’re tired and ready for a break, we suddenly have another batch of exams to mark.

In truth it’s not that hard, it’s just that anything resembling a teaching rhythm is suddenly gone and that makes it feel surreal. You wake up a couple times and try to remember where you’re supposed to be and if you really need to get up or not. (The fear that you’re missing something is what wakes you up.)

Also, because the term is half as long as the others, there isn’t a lot of time to introduce new material. This means almost all final exams are comprehensive which means we have to calm rooms of panicked young men who haven’t followed the rules to keep all their notes and handouts in an easy to access location.

Many of them ask me for copies of the print and I tell them I don’t make any extra copies. If they ask why not I just say it’s because “karma” and “bitch”.

They don’t understand, but it’s still kind of fun to say.

Although I usually like having time to myself, today it was kind of annoying.

At the school where I work today was make-up exams. Any student who gets a 3 (21-30%) as his final score for the term must, in theory, take the make-up exam. If a student gets a 4 (31-40%) he has the option of taking the exam. A 4 is considered a passing grade, although in English classes it’s not high enough to get an automatic recommendation to the attached university (that requires a 6). If a student passes the make-up exam, he can push his grade up one mark.

The problems occur when the student has a 4 because he’s missed a third or more of the total classes. These students get to take the exam but, because they have a habit of missing things, the odds of them showing up for the make-up exam are very slim.

That’s what happened to me today. I got up at a decent hour and then made my way to the school where I printed off my exam paper and did some prep work. At exam time, I found the room early and turned on the heater (which I don’t always do during a make-up exam because that’s the kind of cruel person I am…).

The student didn’t arrive early and at exam time, I found myself standing in the classroom by myself. The problem was, I couldn’t actually leave until the exam time was over (which I learned the term before). If the student had arrived with five minutes left, I would have to give him the exam and then collect it five minutes later.

Instead, I camped out at the front and did a little writing and a little planning. I also looked up a few things on my cellphone, which I’d brought anticipating this happening. The only student who came by was a student who wanted to take a picture of the blackboard and tomorrow’s special exam schedule.

After exam time, I entered an X on the OCR form and turned it in. I then headed out to do nothing for a little while until my evening class. I’d rather have done nothing at home, so maybe this was the student’s payback for his having received a low score.

Today was the first meeting I’ve ever been to where everyone seemed to phone it in, including the people in charge of the meeting.

I’ve mentioned before how the Company For Which I Work (not its real name) has for the last few years, been requiring us to attend odd little training meetings during what used to be time off. The meetings are mostly useless and seem to exist to justify the employment of one or more people above us. Usually, the only useful part is the  sharing session where we pass around lessons that have worked and therefore get a selection of proven ideas.

Today, though, we were expected to describe how last year went–fine except for problems caused by you guys–and then watched a video of a poor gentleman dying in front of a class in what appeared to be a last minute change of schedule. Although the video clip was entertaining in an “I feel you pain” kind of way, it’s the kind of thing I hate doing at meetings such as these. It’s like having a professional baseball player studying a worse player’s batting style and saying “don’t do that” and calling it training.

There was some interesting politics where a couple teachers told us they would lose their positions because the company lost the contract but the company was trying to find them other placements. Why the positions were lost had us taking bets on when the school would come back to CFWIW and beg for trained teachers. (I can’t give more details than that except to say that private schools seemed to have discovered a way to get the free teachers from the JET Programme; the schools then discover that not all foreigners are trained language teachers.)

When we got the sharing part, most of us didn’t have handouts. We just got up and talked about the lesson or activity and promised to deliver it by email if anyone was interested. I tried to get copies of mine, but had technical issues meshed with a lack of incentives to deal with the issues so I just got up and talked.

When time was up, we bolted for the train station and home. We get to do this again in April (for orientation) and then in July (for no reason whatsoever).