Okay, so I am not in Japan, anymore. I came back to the US of A and found a job teaching English to foreign expats, tourists, and students who find themselves washed up on the shores of the Bay Area. It's not such a bad place to get stuck, except that it is criminally expensive and life-prohibitively unaffordable. And it ain't cheap.
But it's not so bad to visit, I suppose. My school works to take kids with elementary and middle school English, learned from non-native speakers, and provide them with some accent polishing, vocabulary expanding, and grammar brush-ups before they jump out into the world of American high schools and universities, where they will undoubtedly have to compare themselves to their native-English speaking peers, and probably show them up. We take some adults too, folks from China, Russia, and India who live and work here and want more confidence in their business English skills. In general, everybody wants to be there, at the school. The teachers like teaching and the students like learning, they know it to be useful, and they suck it up and make do.
There are always exceptions, however, who make things difficult for everyone.
Right now, I have a set of private students, all lovely, among whom one stands out as being a pain in the backside. Not to me, actually. He's pretty decent, polite, and engaged in lessons, when he is in my classroom. Apparently, he doesn't like one of his other classes and is locked in a battle of wills with the teacher of said class.
Now, there are very few kids who really enjoy misbehaving. Most kids like testing boundaries and being reassured that consequences exist and are consistently applied, so they can rely on the powers that be to enforce rules and protections for everybody at all times. Some kids get a kick out of breaking rules, but very few (in my experience) really like stonewalling their teachers. For one thing, in a private lesson, it gets hella boring. Sitting silently staring at each other for twenty minutes is pretty grating on the nerves of all involved parties. I have had kids sit through the last ten minutes of lessons like that - mostly seven-year-olds who didn't believe me when I said I would do that. And they didn't do whatever they were doing to piss me off very often after that. No one likes being bored.
There are older kids who will be rebellious just because they feel like it, but they usually react by pushing the envelope and contradicting everything you say. They don't like being quiet, they don't like sitting still, and they are trying to get a rise out of you.
So when a kid sits in his classroom, across the table from a teacher, staring down at a closed textbook, with an empty quiz sheet on the table, looking miserable, I figure it isn't because he likes the silence. I think it's because he either hates the subject or can't get along with the teacher, neither of which are things he would prefer in a perfect state of affairs.
All of us have subjects we hate, maybe because we innately despise it, maybe because we don't understand it in the slightest. I didn't pass geometry, although I went to class and sat through it. I literally cannot recall a single sensical idea from that class. I am sure I sat in my tiny desk, holding onto the pencil and tracing the shapes on the tests, wondering when I would be free from what I can only describe as a nightmarish experience. I remember that the teacher was a patient guy and that I cried every day over my homework.
But had it been a private class, I know I would have tried just as hard and understood just as little.
Basically if you hate a subject, you just have to suck it up and get through it. There isn't another choice - personal preferences rarely change. You know. Unless it's about wine. Cuz three cups in, and that $9.99 bottle from Chile suddenly has become your favorite merlot.
So it's probably a personal problem.
And this is tricky territory.
For one thing, teachers like to play god. The more atheistic the teacher, generally the more absolute the classroom rule. Go against the official opinion and you'll find yourself slapped with an extra essay, additional homework, and a request that the principal comes to have a chat with you, your mom, and the teacher to discuss your problem with authority. It's like living in a communist dictatorship, except with detention instead of Siberia as the constant looming threat to happiness.
It's way more difficult if there are no other students to balance things out. In such circumstances, the student decides that the only way to avoid active antagonism, especially if they are a more or less well-behaved kid, is to just shut up. And I understand that completely. If everything I say is wrong, why talk anymore? Just sit there and wait for the clock to strike 10:00.
Which is a miserable way to get through a miserable subject.
I don't know how to help these situations, because fault is almost always laid at the feet of the kid. I don't entirely disagree with this. No one is asking you to compromise your values so just sit back, smile and nod, write an essay spewing back the bare facts (avoid parroting the teacher's personal opinions - that just encourages them), and get through it. This is the least of your life's worries. At least here, in the classroom, you're technically safe. No one is going to haul your ass to jail or put you on the chain gang because you give less than your supreme effort. Save your zeal for the subjects you love. Somebody else will come along and stoke that teacher's ego, and hopefully actually like the topic.
It's unfortunate, however, that the above statement is the best way to go. I meet and have met a great number of teachers. They work with big classes, they are underpaid, overworked, and extremely under-appreciated members of the working class. So I understand when they decide that it's their way or the highway and this is the method that works for 70% of the students in the past, so they aren't going to change anything. Change is exhausting, it involves research and study (on your private time - you don't get paid to prepare lesson plans), and you have to test it out in real-life situations, which means some of your classes just became laboratories and if trial day happens to be the same day that the principal comes to sit in - and things don't work out the way you hoped - suddenly you look like a total fuck-up.
So you just stick to the same thing. And the 30% of the kids who don't get it, act out, act up, act like little jerks because they don't understand the relevance of geometry, history, anatomy, or physics. Or god forbid, English. So they just hunker down, praying for anonymity and daylight. Maybe the teacher will never call on them. Maybe they will just get through it if they ignore it long enough.
Hey. It worked for geometry.
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