Before I left the UK, people were asking what I was most looking forward to about teaching English in Japan. Being that I had never done it before, my list was pretty short, but I can remember a few occasions where I felt enthused at the prospect of teaching small children. Once upon a time I didn’t like little kids all that much, but along with pugs, they are the one species which I found myself warming to in recent years (they’re cute and fun and don’t take life seriously, what’s not to like?) so the idea of leading them in spirited sessions of education and jollity was something that I found appealing.
One of the factors boosting the appeal was my perception of how well behaved I thought the children were, and how easy I thought that would make my job. Japan is ultra-civilised; its crime rates are relatively low, people don’t drop their litter in the street and they never cross unless the lights are green. Such model behaviour, I reasoned, would obviously be evident in their young ‘uns. I can remember being in London and seeing Japanese children in restaurants and marvelling at how their exceptional table manners. They sat quietly and chewed with their mouths shut, whereas their western counterparts would be losing their shit worse than Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
I can remember sitting with friends in the weeks prior to my departure, drinking tea and chatting excitedly about much “fun” I was going to have in kid’s lessons. I could picture it all so clearly in my head. It would be like a cross between Dead Poet’s Society and an episode of Pokemon. It was all going to be cute and fun and life-affirming. We’d all sing the ABC song together and they’d memorise basic nouns. At the end of each lesson they would probably give me an affectionate hug before hopping in the car with mum and dad and I would wave them off, beaming with pride that I could help make a difference in their young lives. When they got home they would probably really say really nice things about their sensei in between mouthfuls of curry rice. I might even feel like a surrogate parent to them. Not a dry eye in the house.
Two months, and the reality is very, very different. It turns out that small Japanese children are pretty much exactly the same as small children anywhere else in the world. They are loud and silly and they like to have fun, and having fun does not extend to doing what some foreigner in a suit tells them, however much he may try.
And he has tried. I knew this was going to be a challenging gig, but teaching kids has been the single most challenging aspect of the job and I now laugh at my dreadful naïveté in the weeks before I left. The first few weeks of my “attempts” at kid’s classes were a mixture of cold sweat, sheer terror and amusing attempts at crowd control. The more recent ones were a slight improvement (if you put yourself in the lion’s den enough times, eventually you’ll get used to the lion) but God only knows whether I’m doing a good job or not. It’s difficult to tell how much these little scamps are actually “learning”. I call out sentences and vocabulary and get garbled responses back. I issue simple instructions and am met a look that resembles what Bill Hicks described as “a dog watching you do card tricks”.
The company I work for incorporates games as a part of its lesson structures so there is an awful lot of running around. A lot of the time I’m trying to stop small children slamming themselves against walls like Morten Harket at the end of the video for Take On Me. I am fearful that my lessons will be characterised by a profound lack of learning or injury. I want to hop in a time machine and go back a few months so I can warn myself about what I’m getting into.
One child in particular (let’s call him ‘Takeshi’) is especially hard-going. The boy has the devil in him and simply will not listen. He slams the back of the chair against the wall. He leads an entire class in gutsy sing-alongs of the theme from Yokai Watch. He closes his eyes and snores on purpose in class. I give him handouts and he screws them up into a ball and flings them on the floor. His classmates think he is awesome. I am pretty sure he will either end up running his own crime syndicate or will be the next Steve Jobs. Takeshi is only seven years old. I weep for his adolescence.
And yet, somehow, there are small moments when it all “works”, when my blood, sweat and tears pay off and the children recognise grammar structures or context-sensitive vocabulary. Those moments are few and far between but when they materialise they are a revelation and I get the warm fuzzies. Slowly but surely, I am learning how to sound authoritative. Last week one of my students was acting up in class and I knelt down, looked her straight in the eyes and issued a firm “NO.” She sat down in a split second. Had I tried that a few weeks earlier, she would have cackled at me like a hyena.
I’m still getting to know these kids and I’m still getting to know the job. I’m having to power through the creeping sense of dread that sometimes wafts over me before I start a lesson, but I am also pretty sure that, like so many other things in life, on the other side of the dread, uncertainty and feelings of confusion and terror, there is probably something awesome and I might end up nailing this part of the job after all. Furthermore, ordering kids around is fun.
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