How I Could Just Kill A Man (or student)

The most frustrating thing about being an assistant teacher of English in Japan is having little to no control over the kids. This is no problem when the Japanese teacher with whom I team teach with is doing their job and keeping the brats in line, but I teach at two schools and the contrast between them is amazing, despite them being of similar size and only a ten minutes drive apart.

At one, discipline is simply not required. These are the angelic kids, the ones that the world has been lead to believe are typical of all Japanese students (if only). They are attentive, polite, and keen, and teaching them is easy and fun.

At the other school, I have a number of bad classes, which seem to be getting worse. Today, I had two in a row, and by the end of them, I would have loved to have dished out several beatings to the rude, annoying, disrespectful little punks. The fact that my Japanese teaching partner simply ignores their bad behaviour drives me mad. Whilst they’re all talking amongst themselves, throwing stuff around, and running in and out of class, he just continues the lesson, rarely even raising his voice.

As we are only assistant teachers, it is not our role to discipline the kids, but I now find myself having to, with what seems to be decreasingly little success.

As a result, they know they can get away with it, and I have now come to hate trying to teach them, and hate the little brats themselves. Thankfully, of the 14 classes I teach in total each week, I would only classify 5 as bad, and they are only 50 minutes long, but when I’m in that class trying hard to keep calm, that’s a long, long 50 minutes.