First Lessons

I had my first lessons yesterday,  and they went pretty well. I taught one third year and one second year class yesterday, and one second year class today. The third years were really quiet, but the second year class was pretty fun, they seemed really into it. I was doing an "introduction class" where I had to tell the students about myself. 

The second year class I had this morning was a real challenge. There are about 30 students, and one boy in particular who everyone is convinced has ADHD. He refuses to work in class, and is incredibly disruptive, yelling out while the teacher is speaking and talking back. For the entire 50 minutes he was doing his own thing, talking to his friends and yelling out randomly. The other English teacher had warned me about him before, but I didn't expect it to be that bad. She got into a shouting match with him at one point, telling him to shut up, and he yelled right back at her. Back home if a student had pulled half the crap this kid did, he'd have wound up in the office right away. The kid even got up at one point and wandered out the door onto the balcony that runs along the outside of the second floor of the school, and was kind of just hanging out there for a few minutes. After class the teacher was apologizing to me and explained that this kid is a problem for all the teachers, but no one knows what to do, since his parents won't admit he has ADHD and get him help, and in fact blame the teachers for not being able to get him to focus (in Japan, a kid's teachers are considered almost or sometimes more important than the parents as a shaping factor in a kid's life). She asked me what would happen if a kid behaved this way in the US, so I told her they'd be sent to the office. She said here they're not allowed to send the kid out, because they are considered as having "a right to be there," and the Board of Education would get angry. But then the downside is that the other kids are distracted. It was really awful, I spent the entire period trying to talk to the other students, who were pretty quiet (probably because they didn't want to try to compete with the constant noise from the one boy) and at the same time get that one boy to focus, which I basically gave up on after the first five minutes, and then the rest of the period was just trying to carry on and ignore him, which was nearly impossible. It was kind of a disaster. I feel like if I could speak to him in a common language, I might be able to make some headway, if I read up on dealing with ADHD students. But I can't talk to him, because I don't speak Japanese and he won't speak English. I don't like that the automatic reaction to ADHD in the US is always medicating the kid, but sometimes it helps, and admitting there's a problem is the first step to fixing it. If the parents won't do anything about it, there's not a lot the school can do. It's a pride thing, I think. Mental differences aren't accepted here as much as they are in the US. There's another kid I'm working with, an elementary schooler, who might also have ADD or ADHD, and the teachers don't really know what to do with him, their solution is just to kind of let him do his thing. But there are only two students in that class, not 30. 

The entire attitude towards discipline here seems to be very different. In some ways they are very harsh with the kids, but in other ways they are very permissive. Right now the entire school is preparing for the sports festival, and this involves the kids marching in formations and practicing drills and things, very militaristic. When they do it wrong (which by American standards would be fine, like their snap to attention wasn't quite in unison), the teacher leading the drill will shout "wrong! do it again!" Sometimes the teachers will smack the students on the head (not hard, but if a teacher in the US did that they'd be in trouble). The boys here also hit each other and don't get scolded for it, which brings us to the permissiveness. It often seems like the students just kind of run free, and the teachers don't really regulate them. But this is so at odds with the rigid ceremony associated with formal school activities, it is totally different from an American school. In assemblies, the kids stand in columns by grade, facing the stage, a column of boys, then girls, then boys, etc. They do things like stand at attention, then at ease, then are asked to sit and all take the exact same position, drawing their knees up to their chests. Of course they also all wear uniforms. It's like being in another world, I'm still trying to figure out how everything works.