A short one today in honor of bad students. This is the first full week of class after summer vacation and that means that we are now reintroducing ourselves to our students and reminding them why they are supposed to fear us and/or why they think we are jerks.

Today for example, one of my worst students spent the first few moments after the bell rang zipping and unzipping his trousers in front of his friend’s face. I told him “I you need to do that, get out and do it some place else.” He stopped zipping his pants (with the zipper up, luckily) and sat down in a huff and added, in English “I don’t understand English”. My inner snark monster, encouraged by the devils over my shoulders said “I know. Maybe if you sat down and listened you might learn something.”

I then gave out the assignment, which involved telling a summer vacation story by captioning a series of cartoon images. The students were encouraged to use their imaginations and dictionaries and I wouldn’t give any hints except to remind them it had to be one story. (I also don’t help them unless they ask for help.) The bad student didn’t understand and panicked quite spectacularly. Even lashing out at foreign teachers for not having Japanese instructions on their worksheets. I told him, in English, as the inner snark monster reached 50% capacity, that a lot of Japanese blamed their teachers for their bad English not their own unwillingness to study. “Your bad English is not my fault.”

Finally, someone explained the lesson to him (probably in Japanese). He started writing and after a he had a few sentences I peeked at his paper and he was actually doing the assignment. This surprised me because I assigned a punishment letter to a student with similar behavioral issues and, although he appeared to working, he turned in an expletive laden screed full of death threats to me and the principal and wishes that we both would die. In his defense, it was the most English he’d ever written.

Eventually, zipper boy finished the assignment. Oddly, this was the quietest he’d ever been in class and he earned a very rare full class marks.  I may have to give him more caption assignments.

Next class, though, the students have to present their stories as a speech. They get bonus points if they can do it without using the paper.

The inner snark monster never got past 50% today. it is still mad at me. However, history has shown that at least five students will forget their papers next class, including zipper boy.

The inner snark monster will then go full snark and say “Lucky you! Now you get bonus points!”