Generally, I would say the students I am closest to are my ninenseis at Kita Ko, my base school. I am at my base school the most and have lessons with the six ninensei classes (A-F) there the most often.
So I would say I know these kids pretty well. I have actual relationships with quite a few of them, and I know things about their lives, and we talk. But really, my favorite class as a group is the class that all the other teachers dislike teaching.
These kids don’t always pay attention, they talk during class and sometimes over the teacher, they misplace handouts and fail quizzes. Although they act much like an average class in America, maybe even like a better behaved one, they are little terrors by Japanese standards, especially in a school as prestigious as Kita Ko. Teachers balk at having to teach them, and the only subject they all do their homework for is math (they belong to the science track, so math and science are more their interests than English or…school…).
I love having class with these kids though, precisely because they don’t maintain the silent, model Japanese classroom. They make a rote lesson plan more interesting by being more interactive and showing more personality, even if they aren’t always interacting with the material at hand. I like joking with the girl in the back about how she never has her handouts and always responds with “Kami nai!” when I ask her about it. I loved when I congratulated one of the boys on his quite high writing test score, and he laughed and showed me his quite low reading test score. I think it’s hilarious that the two boys in the back always talk when they are supposed to be practicing reading, and then whip back to their papers whenever I walk by, even though all three of us know what’s going on.
However, I maintain a healthy fear of them. They kind of scare me because they are all little pranksters. Once, one of my favorite boys tried to get me to take a piece of gum from him. I was suspicious a) because they aren’t allowed to chew gum during class, and b) because Japan doesn’t sell packs of stick gum. I didn’t take it and told them it was scary, and later he showed me that it would have flicked my finger if I had taken it. And that is exactly the kind of behavior that endears them to me and makes the other teachers dislike teaching them. Straight up cheek.
The only thing they seem consistently interested in is pronunciation, and one of the most hilarious class incidents was when they were all trying to say “Ethiopia” correctly. My JTE has said they pay more attention when I am there, and I think part of that is because they are interested in my pronunciation. They will listen silently to my reading of a boring textbook story they have heard ten times when they will talk through things my JTE explains to them in Japanese. They are always asking me to pronounce words for them, and they’ve been struggling over “anxiety” for two weeks now. To my constant amusement.
These kids show more personality in class than the other classes (not that they have more than the other students…they just show it more), and that is why I love going to class with them. They are different. In a place that molds kids into perfect rule-followers, there’s the class that doesn’t conform. They once told me they wanted me to teach class by myself, and when I told them that would mean no Japanese at all, they seemed fine with it. But I’m pretty sure that’s because they had some kind of ulterior motive – which is exactly what makes them so fun.
