One of the odd twists of teaching English in Japan is that sometimes your worst students have the best English. The worst of those are the “returnees”, the students who’ve lived overseas.
Several years ago, I had a student who’d spent a good portion of his life in the USA. He hated being back in Japan so much he actually made his parents send him to a different school. One class he was there, the next class he was not and his friends said he’d gone to a rival school with a better building.
About that same time, I had a returnee who would finish his work quickly and then proceed to keep his friends from finishing theirs. If I assigned pair work, he’d make his partner do all the work while he slept. After several loud altercations involving me telling him to work or get out my class, he failed the term. This resulted in some attention from the Powers What Are at the school as they inquired how a returnee could fail English. I said he did it by being a “an obnoxious little shit” or “by lacking focus” or something like that.
Eventually he and I reached an agreement: as long as he finished his work and didn’t disturb anyone else, he could sit off to the side and sleep. Which he did happily.
In defense of returnees, they do tend to attract a lot of “why don’t you do this for me?” attention and they get tired of it. They also live in a culture where it’s not okay to stand out too much. I can tell, in almost any class of any age, who the returnee is because as soon as I give instructions, everyone in the room turns and looks at the returnee for a translation. That gets bad enough that I’ve actually told returnees that unless I ask them to translate, they don’t speak English.
The worst class, though, was my first year at the school. I made the mistake of calling my third year high school elective “Introductory English”. Every student but one was a returnee looking for an easy grade. I’d give them an assignment and 20 minutes later they’d all be finished and I’d still have 80 minutes to fill. They were pretty much like “Here we are now. Entertain us.”
It was good teacher improvisation practice, but it wasn’t a lot of fun.