Some kids, I'll be happy to say good-bye to

My last post was mourning the fact that I had to say good-bye to some awesome children and their teachers. I'm not going to feel the same way about every group of children. Some I can't wait to see the last of, like some of the kids I taught today. I had one good class, one mediocre class, and three classes of little <insert expletives here> monsters. 6th period was particularly fun. For some reason, the Vice Principal was there watching the class. He's never watched any of my classes before.

Those kids have been steadily growing more and more out of control all year, and today's lesson plan was a bit ambitious (the kids were supposed to present simple restaurant skits). It was disastrous. They had had practice time last week, but utilised it for chatting/wrestling etc instead. When it came for them to present the skits in small groups, very few of them knew the basic vocab that we've been working on for the past four lessons, "What would you like?" and "I'd like ...". We'd even practised it again at the start of the lesson, but it was too much to for almost all of them, despite the fact that pretty much all the kids in the other class had been able to do it really well

So they couldn't do the task, and weren't interested in watching any of the other groups perform, which in a way was fair enough, because watching a group of people being prompted through every line is not particularly interesting, I admit. The homeroom teacher was determined that all the kids were going to do their skits. One of the boys burst into tears refusing to do it. The teacher argued with him for a while, then the Vice Principal talked to him. In the end, the boy sat out. A little later, I looked up from prompting the group who were "presenting" to see the Vice Principal dragging a boy out of the broom cupboard. That mustn't have been exciting enough, because the next time I noticed the boy, the Vice Principal was physically hauling him out of the classroom, chair and all, presumably for a talking to.

Somehow, by the end of the lesson all the kids (except the crier) had taken part, at least somewhat, in a restaurant skit. One more lesson with those kids, and then they'll be someone else's problem. (Which lucky AET will inherit them as Yr 6?) All the Vice Principal said to me afterwards was "Gokurosama-deshita", which is a ritualised phrase that basically means "You worked hard".