It's Time to Get Tough

I adore my sixth-graders. For the most part, I look on them as very young friends more than my students. I participate in their club activities, I hang out with them when I meet them at the baseball field or running around town, they're just a very good collection of kids and mostly I love them.

I loved them last year when Miyu asked me who is my favorite character in One Piece and then gave me a Sanji bookmark. I loved them when Rhyusei ran up and sat next to me during break time basketball, brilliant smile on his skinny face and excitedly waving as though he hadn't seen me in years even though he sat next to me at lunch. There are a few less than brilliant specimens, but they are not rotten apples, at least not to the core. Maybe a bit mealy and one or two worms have possessed them, at the very most.

Today, however, we had a frank exchange of expectations.

Last year, when I showed up at Tokyo Orientation, one of the things the powers that were stressed most emphatically was that ALTs (assistant language teachers) do not enforce discipline in the classroom. It is the responsibility of the homeroom teacher to keep the kids in line. I agree wholeheartedly with this concept. I am a foreigner and I don't speak fluent enough Japanese to make an impression on the kids, especially when they are misbehaving. (Recently, they take it as a matter of course that I can speak a great deal of Japanese, but seem to think I choose not to. I honor them for their lack of discernment on this issue.) I also think it's important that the kids' interaction with a foreigner be as positive as humanly possible. Most of these kids will never meet another foreigner, outside of the JET program, and it follows that the foreigner should not be someone who smacks them upside of the head in anger at their misbehaving (my fifth-grade teacher has done that to students, but I love him and they love him and they always say, "I deserved that" so apparently it's okay.)

There have been instances, especially at JR High, where I have desperately wanted to bring out the mighty hammer of righteous wrath, but I haven't been permitted to do this. I have never wanted to pull out the big guns on Kohei, Namiki, Kouki, Miku, and Riku until today.

The homeroom teacher went on vacation for the last half of the school day (she's also out tomorrow, smart lady) and it was me and an assistant who mostly sits silently during English class, sometimes jumping into games if we have an uneven team. The kids were a bit rowdy, but I put it off on the rain that's been falling since early this morning, making outdoor exercise all but impossible and disallowing any expenditure of excess energy. So I let it go, because 90% of the time, they reign themselves in.

Not today.

Today, they experimented with rambunctiousness, my good kids started distracting other students, and my bad students started being insolent. They mostly ignored me.

Until the hammer descended.

I think I slammed a stack of flashcards on the desk. This encouraged most of them to look up, since I do not ever act like this. Then I turned to them and made two very brief and solemn as an execution comments:

"You all need to get it together right now. I am not going to say this again."

There was another teacher in the classroom who could have translated for me, but I was praying against it. I stood at the front, waiting, individually calling out kids who were still acting up. When they all go the hint (which didn't take very long, surprisingly), I went back to the class with as sober a demeanor as I possibly could hold.

There were no more disruptions. And two of them apologized at the end of class.

They are a great class. Most of them interact with me regularly and positively outside of class. I don't think a little respect in the classroom is too much to require. I am the teacher after all.