Tuesday, December 11, 2007

I'm Ta-rd.

Dead dog tired. Plum tuckered out. I couldn't get to sleep last night. When I finally did, Cameron and Alex thought it would be funny to call my repeatedly, presumably drunk, at 2:30 in the morning. I got up at 6:20 but never really got up. I decided to take a new route to school-Hankyu to Umede, Sennichimae line to Tiashibashi Imaichi. It was faster.

Today I taught the bane of my teaching career; 2-4. Imaichi, 2-4. I rather like their homeroom teacher. He has the desk next to mine and is the hulking rugby coach as well as a nice guy. 2-4 is full of half-wits and chowder heads. It also presents a good lesson in the problems with team teaching.

Team teaching assumes that we are not real teachers, we are special guests. In most classes, the teachers and students have taken me on as a real teacher and I haven't had many problems. However, the environment makes discipline confusing. Who's job is it? Am I a step-parent? An uncle? A guest in the home? Do I have a right to discipline a kid? Do they think I have the right to discipline them? To confuse all of this, the teacher for all of the 2nd year classes at Imaichi, while being a nice guy, is kind of a nice guy. He lets a lot of shit go. The problem with 2-4 is that they talk constantly through everything that I am trying to say. There are kids in the class who are trying to do the lesson and the rest just talk. I tell them repeatedly to stop talking. I don't whine about it. I don't say "Please, please, pretty please, you Kings of New England." At this point I ask them at the first of class, "Can we have class today?" I know the kids by name. I stop the class and ask them, by name, why they are talking and knocking the desks around and being pests. If it were just me in the class I would go over the top, grab the worst one, and throw them out of class. I wanted to today. Not in a lose my shit kind of way. But to tell them that they aren't allowed to act the fool in my classes. But, with the presence of another teacher I have to walk a tight rope. But I know he isn't going to do anything.

To make it worse, and what really pissed me off today is that one of the girls, who was sitting in the back doing everything but paying attention, said to me, "I'm sorry I don't understand English." When I got on to her. That actually pissed me off. That is why me and James go on about the "I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish." scene in Anchorman. When the girl, and the boy next to her were acting up during the class, I walked to the back and said to both of them, "You can't act like this in my class. I have asked you nicely, now it is time to quit, got it?" In perfectly intelligible Japanese, that was her response. I think that that is so insanely disrespectful that I do see it as a reason to make her leave class. Also, it undermines discipline altogether. This problem has been recurrent in Japanese classes. I imagine that a lot of teachers are kind of oblivious to it and are made a joke of a good deal of the time. Homey don't play that. I used to have these terrible neighbor children in Saito. They would run in my house without asking. If I yelled at them in Japanese, they would laugh. If I yelled at them in English, they would say, "We can't understand." Annoying. As a larger issue it is one reason why I hate most English TV personalities. They allow themselves to be made a joke of for profit so mos Japanese people, especially children, see foreigners as 'funny people' even in a serious situation, even when they aren't joking. I ain't no joke son.

Oh look, I found a video of my Christmas lesson:


3 comments:

Unknown said...

My second very proud moment today: #1 Cora sent notice of her graduation. #2 Wes has become the teacher i respect. Sounds like you have exactly the right attitude to teach kids in my book. Well done. David don't play that either.

wwc said...

Did Cora graduate from UT or UNO?

I learned it by watching you David. You and Larry.

Unknown said...

Cora from UNO. Now she and Eli are moving to the Pacific Northwest.

attempting to silence the voices in my head.