I’m willing to bet that, no matter who they are and how soft-spoken and mild-mannered they are, no matter how much they enjoy teaching and no matter how dedicated to their profession they are, every teacher has dreamed of telling off a student.

I have lived that dream. Kind of. In a way. Rather disturbingly in retrospect.

It happened the end of my first year teaching in Japan. Japanese public school classes are much noisier than most Westerners expect. As I’ve said before, school is often considered social time and teachers tolerate an amount of noise that would trigger meetings and therapy sessions in the USA. Some weeks you can handle it and getting the attention of the class is a game; the next week culture shock sets in and you get angry and frustrated and you start shouting a lot.

In my case, the second wave of culture shock hit in June. For reasons I don’t fully understand, Japanese school years run well into July instead of ending at the end of May when God intended them to end. (I can’t remember the exact verse; And I say unto thee, go thee forth from thy school when the wind turneth as to the South and prosper ye about merrily in thine own way but mostly in Mine.) Something like that.

The weather was getting muggy and hot and my decades of conditioning resisted being in class that late. None of the student rooms were air conditioned.The result was not pretty, although it was kind of fun. I was teaching first year junior high (7th grade) and trying to help a girl during who was finally speaking to me. She’d asked a question and I was there to help her. The boy next to her, though, kept butting in with the answer and what she was doing wrong as she was trying to talk.

Finally, something snapped in my head. I asked the little shi, er, LAD, “Are you an English teacher?” After a couple rounds of “huh?” and me repeating, my Japanese English Teacher finally translated my question. “Are you an English teacher?” He went “No. No. No.” and I said “Then shut the fuck up.”

The teacher translated it as “Please be quiet sit down” in a tone that said “Please be quiet sit the hell down before the insane foreigner loses his last thread of sanity.”

To this day I have mixed feelings about that incident. He was trying to be helpful and I could have reacted in a different way. On the other hand, the young lass had the floor and he was stepping on it. Either way, after my initial feeling of horror and “Did I just say that out loud?” I realized it was kind of fun and actually felt good to say that.

I haven’t done it since. I’ve already lived that dream.

If you had told me, when I was a kid, that I could have a paying job where I spent most of my time sitting around doing nothing and that there was a place with all-you-can-eat sweets, I’d say that was pretty much my vision of heaven.

Then, strangely enough, I found both in the same country.

When I first started working in Japan, I was required to be at school on weekdays even when there was nothing for me to do. In fact, my first assignment was to sit around and “plan” and “study Japanese” while the students took exams. “Planning” and “studying Japanese” took care of the first two hours. Then I wrote a bit which took care of the third hour. Then I read a bit, which took care of the fourth. Then I ate lunch. Then, whatever I tried to do, I couldn’t do anything. My brain was so overcome with restlessness/cabin fever, that I couldn’t focus on anything. Remember how that last five minutes of Algebra felt in high school when the clock didn’t move and teacher became more and more incomprehensible? That’s pretty much what my entire afternoon was like, except I didn’t have math gibberish to comfort me (in an odd way).

Even after I got a laptop computer and put Civilization II on it, I found it was difficult to concentrate those last two hours. Sometimes in my current job, especially during school trips, I find myself with a five hour “lunch”. That last hour is hell, even with internet access.

I also found that world where you can eat all the sweets you want. In fact, Japan seems to have quite a few all-you-can-eat sweets buffets. Back when I was in Niigata, I went to such a buffet with She Who Must Be Obeyed and one of her friends. There was a great mix of cake and ice cream and other random pastries and all the coffee we could drink for 90 minutes. This was great at first. I was thinking “Let me eat cake!” and “Bring me coffee in a golden goblet. I’ll have none of this ceramic crap! Where is my golden spoon?”

After 45 minutes, I began to feel the pain. My body started to reject the sweets (the same way your body starts to reject beer and wine when you’ve had too much) and even the coffee started tasting bland. After one hour, I was ready to sell my soul for a slice of bacon. (The devil did appear, but he only had lightly fried Canadian bacon so I told him to screw off and send another deity.) If there’d been a shaker full of salt anywhere nearby, I’d have poured it in my coffee.

Today, to celebrate the last day of the Golden Week holiday, we went to a place called Sweets Paradise, which let us gorge on sweets for 90 minutes, but also provided pasta dishes (which is, arguably, another form of sugar) and rotisserie chicken. The non-sweets helped a lot, but we still all reached the “that’s about enough of that” point.

We got what we wished for though–so much we didn’t want it anymore–and we got an inch or two on our waistlines for free.

One of the interesting things about teaching at an all boys school is that I get to see, for better and for worse, the boys behaving the way boys behave when there are no girls around to impress. The homerooms are basically multi-resident bachelor pads that start out clean and get slowly grungier and grungier over the week.

The other interesting thing is that boys tend to forgive slights, both real and perceived, more easily than girls and they can be a lot more forward. As a result, many of them aren’t shy about confronting teachers and/or back talking. Usually, as a teacher, I adopt the rule comedians live by: never let a heckler have the last word. For example, when a student told me to shut up, which at least he did in English, I talked him out of the room–he seemed to think we were actually going to fight–and let him explain to his homeroom teacher why it was necessary for me to shut up.

Every now and then, though, one of them says something that I can’t help but let pass. They aren’t always confrontational, just different. The student who told me to shut up gave a funny, improvised speech about how he was the best speaker in Japan. He wasn’t going to get a good score because he hadn’t actually followed the assignment. However, I said he was right, he was the best speaker, and said he was going to the speech contest. His “Really? No no way” (in Japanese of course) was pretty funny, although perhaps not the way he expected.

Another student gave a speech about his skin, which he kept deliberately pale and sickly looking. Once again, it violated pretty much every requirement of the assignment, but was done well enough I let it pass.

In a less happy one, a kid in a lower level junior high class decided that because he didn’t understand what he was supposed to be doing, he was automatically granted free time. He put his book away and took out a pair of lighters and started playing with them. I confiscated the lighters and turned them into the homeroom teacher. The next class, after I called his name in roll I said “Gotta light.” he just mumbled “Fuck you” under his breath. Since I was the instigator, and since it was the most English he’d spoken in two classes, I let that one slide.

This one technically doesn’t count because it’s from a different school, but when I was back in Niigata, some of my students were returning from P.E. They’d been studying Judo and were still in their dogis. One boy looked an me, held up and flexed his arms like a body builder and said “I’m fighting for justice” and then went on down the hall.

My favorite, though, involved two high school boys who, because they were friends, always worked together on in-class projects. Work, in this case, being relative not literal as they spent most of their time messing around and talking. After a while, I told them that if they didn’t get their work done, they’d never be together again. The more flamboyant of the two looked me straight in the eye with feigned horror and said “Like Romeo and Juliet.” I laughed through something about not ending up like them, but I’d already lost that round.

The student lost points, of course, for not doing his work correctly, but it was a small victory for me as he probably never noticed.