Untold Story 1

Here's a post that I started to write in June and never finished until now. Please enjoy...
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There are certain scenarios that ALTs come across. For one, ALTs are asked typical questions by students and coworkers. Among the common ones are "do you have a boyfriend?" and "do you know how to use chopsticks?" Those are silly and maybe annoying, but easy enough to answer. Sometimes, we're faced with awkward questions. It is not unheard of for ladies to be asked, "what is your bra size?" and for male ALTs to be asked, "how many centimeters?" I won't elaborate any further, you get the picture. Along with being cultural ambassadors, ALTs must come up with quirky answers to questions that are just plain awkward. It's a rite of passage, so to speak, and only when we succeed in coming up with witty answers are we getting closer to becoming clever ALTs that can avoid embarrassment  The true moment of victory is when we can sense the questions forming and create a diversion to change the subject. Unfortunately, I haven't reached that point. Some of them still catch me off guard.

In addition to the questions, there are certain incidents that occur at school. ALTs may witness other teachers softly (or loudly O_o) smack students on the head -- a situation that would be met with nothing short of a lawsuit in the States. ALTs also have the pleasure of observing teachers clip their fingernails in the staffroom, or of listening to teachers gargle and rinse their mouths in the staff room sink. To be fair, these don't happen on a regular basis, but that they do happen is my point.

Then, we hear stories of violent behavior in the classroom that have happened to "a friend of a friend," but that we don't often see. We wonder whether they really happened or if people embellish the truth. I can tell you for a fact that they do happen.

In the beginning of this semester, things got a little crazy in Hyogo. It was a lovely spring day in April, and everything was moving along smoothly in class, when a student decided to add excitement to my day. All morning, I had been asking students to introduce themselves in front of their peers. Most students were enthusiastic about participating and received their first participation point for their "passport". The "passport" is a thin, handmade booklet used to keep track of participation points. Students can earn stickers, and in doing so, move through countries. It motivates students, and even the least enthusiastic students like collecting the stickers in order to "zoom across the world".

During this first lesson, my day took an unexpected twist after second period. We were finishing up student introductions, when the bell rang. I had just made a student stand up -- seconds before the sound of the chime -- and he thought he had gotten off the hook. However, I surprised him when I told him to do his introduction anyway. The student resisted, and when he saw that I wasn't backing down, he slid his passport away from him. The JTE pushed the passport back towards the student. The student then crumbled his passport, and started talking back to us. It was then that I awkwardly announced to the class that we had finished for the day, and rushed to the front of the classroom for the closing greeting. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the student kick his chair and we all heard it hit the ground. I couldn't tell you who was more shocked, me or the students. Now, this is the kind of story that circulates the JET community, but that not everyone experiences. After all, we're  told that Japanese students are among the best behaved students in the world... Teachers made the student apologize, and he very humbly did so during lunchtime. I accepted his apology, and since then I cautiously ask him to participate. I must admit though, I secretly fear he's going to through a chair at me when I pass by his desk...

A few weeks after that, I was unprepared for the sudden crying that began in the middle of a lesson. I don't remember what kind of activity we were doing, but one of my female students had started crying and wailing for no apparent reason. And there really was no apparent reason -- this student is prone to anxiety in unfamiliar situations, but the teachers aren't too sure about the main triggers. Everything about my classroom is unfamiliar: I'm a foreigner teaching a foreign language in a classroom that they only come to once a week. I didn't know about her anxiety at the time, so I wasn't sure how to approach the situation, especially since the JTE was already by the girl's side, trying to calm her. I tried to continue teaching, but it was impossible to practice pronunciation, or anything else, when all we could hear was crying and all of the sounds that accompany it. At that point, I went to talk to the girl and suggest that she go to the bathroom for a breather, or to the nurse's office if she wasn't feeling well. However, the girl reported that she wanted to stay in the classroom. I was really lost at that point. The student went to the back of the classroom and sat on the floor, and eventually calmed down. She completed all of the worksheets, and occasionally we would hear whimper-like sounds coming from the back of the classroom. The JTE never left her side. It was the first and last time it happened in my classroom, but I really wish I would have been in the know about my student's bouts of anxiety.

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My job might have been repetitive, but there was hardly a dull moment with these kids.