Veni, Vidi, Vici

A few days ago, I taught a sixth-grade class by myself. I was not prepared for this. My JTE had told me the previous week what the lesson was going to be, but I had no idea that I would be teaching the entire 50-minute lesson by myself. When I walked into the classroom, there wasn't even another teacher there to pass the torch. My JTE had left me no workbook (which all the activities are in), no textbook ("Sorry, kiddo. Gotta steal yours for a sec..."), and no activity CD.

I wanted to punch her in the ovaries.

BUT, I kept a smile on my face and improvised until I remembered what the hell I was supposed to be teaching. The last thing I needed to do was show my kids that I had no idea what I was doing. The great thing about the kids in Sai, though, is that they are impeccably well-behaved. I want to adopt at least ten of them.

I confiscated a student's book and quickly thumbed through the pages until I found one that looked familiar. Oh, YEAH! The lesson is about time. Uhhh... what am I supposed to do again? Long story short, my class was a complete success. The activity that took the longest was counting to sixty one by one. If someone messed up the subsequent number, we started aaaaall the way back at one. This tricky little game took up about 20 minutes of the class period. GENIUS!

The best part about the class was that my JTE's horrible pronunciation was absent. I taught the kids the way I thought they should learn. As an ALT, I've found that freedom in the classroom isn't so abundant. If you ever get the opportunity to have ANY say about how a lesson should be done, SPEAK UP! I have a lot of freedom in my elementary schools but not so much at my junior high. When I do get that freedom, I make the most of it, and I feel like my students benefit from my activities/lessons more than they do from being lectured at for 50 minutes.

Speaking of activities, a really great one that takes up a lot of time and gets the kids really active is a simple game in which you have three sentences on the board and the students have to guess which of the three is written correctly. For example:

1) Commander Shepard fights aliens.
2) Commander Shepard fight aliens.
3) Commander Shepard fight alien.

Only one of those sentences is grammatically correct. Two students go up to the board to secretly write their answers. Beforehand, however, one person from each team decides how much money to bet that the answer the other person on their team chooses will be correct. Whoever gets the answer right wins the whole pot of money. If it's a tie or both teams are wrong, the money stays there for the next round.

This is a REALLY great way to get the kids to use their brains, think quickly (I start counting down from 5 if they take too long to guess), and identify what's wrong in a sentence by breaking it down into smaller pieces. After I reveal the answer, I ask them why the other two sentences are wrong.

It's great to have some control in the class for your own sanity, but the most important thing is that leading the class also builds your relationships with your students on two different levels: as a teacher and as someone fun! For example, today I played the game I described above with my 9th graders. They got super into the game, which was awesome, but they tended to talk over me sometimes. I picked my favorite student to torment and called him up to the board. I was about to put my arm around him and embarrass him, but I thought that would be too much. So, I simply made him face the blackboard for a few minutes and let the class laugh at him. This may sound cruel, but at this point, my kids already know that I'm not being mean by isolating him. I adore this kid. He's one of the ones I want to adopt! I only made him stand up there with me for two minutes before I let him sit back down. Nobody likes overkill. As he walked away, I gave him a reassuring pat on the back. (Later, I was bent over laughing about a 1000 yen bill he had folded into looking like a turban was over Noguchi Hideyo's head. It was about 90% as funny as I was making it look, but I made it look 10% funnier to make up for picking on him earlier. See? I'm all about balance!)

The only reason I pick on him is because we have a really good relationship. He's the first of the boy students that I met, the first that I had an inside joke with (I call him mondaiji), and the only student I've sat down with and spoken to for two hours until eleven o'clock at night. You read right! I got to know him way better than any of the other kids. I seriously took out a pen and paper and interviewed him. I don't normally do that, but after about forty-five minutes of talking to him, I sensed that he had pretty low self-esteem. I wanted to make him feel important, so I asked him every question I could from his favorite color to his dream job.

I didn't want our conversation to turn into an English lesson, (and we did speak in Japanese a bit) but I still wanted to challenge him. I really believe in this kid. None of the teachers think he's smart, but I know for a fact that he is. When I speak to him in English, he generally understands what I want from him, he just has a harder time producing an answer for himself (I'm the same way in Japanese, so I completely relate to this obstacle). Neither of us were expecting to talk to one another for two hours, and by the time eleven o'clock rolled around, I could see he was exhausted. I decided it was time for me to go. I smiled at him and said, "You know, I'd leave, but your little brother is still playing with my iPhone..."

"Oi!" He yelled. "Kaeru tte."
(Hey! She said she's leaving.)

It was awesome getting to see an older brother interact with his younger brother. The little kid (who happens to be in my sixth-grade class) had been transfixed with a simple block-puzzle game on my iPhone for at least an hour. I told him I'd let him play with it some other time. I also gave him a Naruto cellphone charm since I had three of the same one in my purse at the time. Don't ask me why.

Kind of a long backstory to explain my justification for teasing this one kid, but that's what it is. I'm really sad that he's a 9th grader. It means I only have a few months left with him until he's off to high school in a completely different city. It's only been four months, but I've grown really attached to my kids. Sure, some I like more than others, but that's because some kids just naturally stand out while others take a little while to come out of their shells. You can always tell that a kid wants to talk to you if they're staring. And while I do approach these kids and ask them if there's anything they want to talk about, they always say no. If this happens to you, just know that they're embarrassed to be put on the spot/to have drawn your attention. With shy kids, I try to be extra encouraging and always smile at them.

Today at lunch, the music teacher asked if I played any sports. I had told everyone that I golf in my self-introduction, but no one knew that I recently started playing futsal (indoor soccer). Before I could say any more, the music teacher yelled across the room to another teacher: "DID YOU KNOW SHE PLAYS FUTSAL?!" I hate when people make a big deal about knowing a tidbit about my life, especially when I'm just a beginner at something (like I am at futsal). This also caused all of my 9th graders to stare at me. In all the commotion, however, I noticed that one of the shyer boys at my table nodded to himself with a quiet "sugee". We shared a brief smile. And that's what it's all about.