Troublemakers at School

Hi again everyone!

As you can tell from the title, today will not be all sunshine and rainbows as usual. For those unfamiliar with its inner workings, Japan seems like a peaceful, docile, and friendly environment. The people are known to be nice and generous, with the Buddhist and Shinto religious background reflecting that. Other parts of Japan are known to be very strict, such as the insistence on punctuality and proper situational behavior/language. However, when these two opposing regimes clash, sometimes the result is a hideous bastard of Japanese bureaucracy. The educational system is one of those bastards.

In Japan, education is mandatory from kindergarten up to the end of middle school. In America, education is mandatory as well, but students can very well be barred from school for various reasons, most notably behavior. The teachers and schools have some disciplinary power to put students in their place if they are misbehaving in class, such as visits to disciplinary figures in the office, getting kicked out of class, or detentions/suspensions/expulsions.

The term "mandatory" is held to a more strict standard here in Japan than in America. Here, the students are entitled to their seat in the classroom. Students must be allowed to be in their classroom, even if they are a disruption. This basically means that the teachers have very little power to do anything to control their students. Teachers can't discipline their students in any way except for yelling at them or lowering their grade. Students can definitely be held back grades, but this is hardly ever done because teachers want to get the problem children out of the system as quickly as possible. The teachers are basically helpless.

At most of the better schools, discipline is not so much of a problem. The kids at these schools tend to be whipped into shape by strict teachers that explode in anger at the smallest infringement of the rules. This can include how you talk, stand, sit, behave, or dress. The kids usually choose to do what they are told, and dealing with the students in class is painless (though frustrating if you're trying to make them participate more). The thing to note here is that the students have a choice.

In the worse schools, lots of the students choose to ignore the teacher completely and sleep (or sometimes read a novel) in class. Nobody can stop them, since they have a right to be in the classroom and physical punishments are forbidden. Thankfully, the sleeping students don't cause a disruption, so teachers tend to leave them alone.

Then, there are some students that choose to ignore the teacher and talk to their friends instead. They are certainly annoying, and tend to get yelled at by the teachers because they make it hard for other students to pay attention. Even these students I don't have much of a gripe with, since they don't directly want to cause trouble. They only want to keep themselves entertained.

Finally, there are the kids that seek only to be a disruption. They pay attention to the teacher, but only to determine in what way is best to disturb the lesson at hand. These kids will pester their classmates, get out of their chairs and roam the room at will, and just try their hardest to piss the teacher off.

I have a few of the bad schools in the city, so I have some experience with these kinds of kids. I've had a boy that used his silver metal pencil case as a sun reflector to blind me for 10+ minutes of a class. I've had kids who got out of their chairs and just left the classroom unannounced. I've had kids drum on their desks loudly, or stick stuff into the metal heating elements on the side of the room (which they seem to particularly like doing). I've had a kid who ran about the classroom closing curtains, opening windows, and turning off lights. I've had a kid open a 3rd story window and threaten to throw a chair out, before pretending (only pretending, unfortunately) to jump out himself.

Most frequently, I've had students who are just plain rude. Their teacher would tell them to quiet down, and they would reply with "shut your mouth!" They will openly call their teacher "idiot" or "dumbass" to their face. They tend to be boys, but I've seen girls do this a few times too. The teachers who take this abuse also tend to be female, as I and other male teachers don't have this problem nearly as much, but I have been at the pointy end of this behavior a few times.

The first was, as I mentioned before, the kid who used the sun reflector. I just tried my best to ignore him and resist going over there to shove the pencil case down his throat. It got cloudy eventually, which made his attempts futile. However, there was also a kid who would not stop saying "shut up" every time the teacher or I said anything in English. I warned the kid to stop it, which kept him quiet for a little while. A few minutes later, he was at it again, so I got fed up. I walked  up to his desk, put my face centimeters away from his, and gave him the good ol' Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction. "Say that again. I dare you." That certainly wiped the goofy smile off his face, and needless to say he didn't misbehave for the rest of the class. However, I know for sure that I would have been reprimanded if my supervisor had been there.

A few months ago, the question was asked by one of the other ALTs in the prefecture: "What do we do if we had some misbehaving students?" The specific answer was, "Assistant Language Teachers are not responsible for discipline in the classroom. You should let your teacher in charge handle it." Obviously, if there are misbehaving students, the teacher in charge is not "handling it" in any way, shape, or form. Regardless, the job of the ALT is merely to be the language servant of the teacher in charge, and I was probably very out of line when I confronted the student for his behavior. I'm willing to ignore sleeping or talking students, and I can withstand students who are disruptive. I can even pent my rage when students are obnoxiously rude to their teachers, but if kids feel like they can do the same to me and get away with it, my inner sense of justice doesn't allow me to sit back and do nothing. Some things in this world must be done. I'll just need to tone it back in the future.

Well, that's enough complaining for today. Most of my students are great and a lot of fun to be around, so they make up for the rest of the bad kids. Let's just hope it doesn't get any worse.

Farewell, until next time...