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| Purple clouds for an emo post... sometimes I think I'm not even trying ;) |
I’ve been teaching S since he was nine. I was told that he
was “abnormal” but, as is typical, no one seemed particularly interested in the
specifics of his needs. I have a number of friends on the Autism Spectrum and
both my mother and sister work with special needs children, so I’m fairly
confident in guessing that S is an “aspy”, but it is just a guess. He loves English and has always been
better than his classmates at constructing sentences, but English classes are
difficult for him. They are typically noisy, high-energy and in elementary
schools always a little chaotic. These issues were compounded for him by
unfortunately having a home room teacher who insisted on playing karuta as the
main activity every single lesson. In (English) karuta the students sit in a
circle with vocabulary flashcards scattered face up in the center. The ALT says
a word and the students smack their hands down onto the right card. The first
person to touch it keeps it, and the winner is the student with the most cards
at the end of the game. It is competitive, almost always involves screaming and
kids fighting over who touched the card first, frequent scratches and bruises and S could not cope with the
situation. Every class would end with him kicking over a chair or desk and
running from the classroom in distress. I asked the teacher to alter the plan to
an activity where S could participate more easily, but he refused. He lacked
confidence in English teaching and wanted to stick to an activity he was
familiar with (and that didn’t require him to use any English).
S is now finishing up his first year of junior high. His
grade is the most out of control and unpleasant I have ever taught, and he is
in the worst class of the whole bad bunch. For the first time ever in my ALT
career there is bullying and exclusion occurring in front of me. In this
unfortunate situation S is struggling, and his vile classmates have made a
hobby of taunting him. In the general atmosphere of yankii-ness (it seems every
boy in that grade dreams of being either a member of a bikie gang or a yakuza),
they have taught S violent posturing. If he shoves another boy in the chest and
yells something along the lines of “who are you fucking with, punk?” the other
kids cheer and egg him on. If he raises his hand and answers a question
correctly they shout abuse at him. When they are bored in class they provoke
him into a breakdown and while the teacher tries to calm him down they laugh
and jeer. I feel like I am describing another reality, it is so unlike any
behaviour I have ever seen from kids in Japan. The girl who sits beside him was
kind to him once and the horrid boys immediately began with “Are you S’s
girlfriend? If you love him so much why don’t you marry him?” In her
desperation to avoid being bullied herself she now won’t even look at him, and
refuses to do pair work activities in class. He doesn’t understand why she
suddenly hates him. He doesn’t understand why the other kids keep talking when
the teacher says “stop talking” or why they all start yelling when he stands up
to answer a question. When a fight breaks out he needs the teacher to tell him
who was in the wrong, and he can’t understand why he is always told to just sit
down, be quiet and let it go no matter what they do to him (I don’t either). And
when it gets too much, he sits on the floor under the black board and hides his
head in his knees or bangs on the floor, and either way the other boys mock him.
One particularly bad day he became violent, kicking over chairs and desks and
swinging punches. The teacher restrained him but every other kid was screaming
at him at the top of their lungs and several boys were running around behind
the teacher to poke his arms or kick his legs. I lost it completely and blasted
the kids, dragging one boy back to his seat by the ear and making it very clear
that my fury was real. I’ve never thought of myself as a violent person, but I
was very close to lashing out that day.
After the class S came to see me, looking exhausted and sad.
“I’m sorry” he said in English. “I’m bad. I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK” I said. “They are bad. Not you. I understand. It’s
OK. I understand.” He blinked at me uncertainly and walked away. I went back to
the staff room and sat down to read an email from a friend who was backing out
of an important commitment she had made months before, for no good reason. I
felt tears welling up in my own anger and frustration and sadness, because in
some ways I feel like S. I don’t understand people at all. I don’t understand how
people can be so selfish and self-absorbed. I don’t understand how someone can
promise orphans that he will come to their Christmas party and then not show up
because he has a hangover. I don’t understand how someone can join a charity
bike-ride without raising any money for the charity, or leave a box of kittens in a school playground. Hell, I don’t even
understand how you can say you’ll be somewhere at nine and then not show up
until a quarter to ten. I genuinely cannot understand it; I feel like I live in
a different reality and my inability to drag the people around me into my reality leaves me
feeling impotent and alone. That is how I feel sometimes. I don’t feel like
that all the time. I can find people who understand me and empathise with my
frustrations. I can express how I feel and I have control over when I put
myself in environments where I will be vulnerable to having these feelings. S
can’t. We can’t even move him into another class, because they are all bad. I
can tell him that I understand, but I only have a flicker of similar experience
that allows me the presumption to tell him that I know how he feels. He is such
a smart kid, with the ability to do so much if only his environment were
appropriate to his needs. There are many many things I love about the school
system in Japan, but I hate the way it lets down the students who most need
support.
After that horrible day, I called my mum and she gave me
some really useful advice on small things I could do in class to help S. I
started slipping him a note with the lesson plan on it. He could check what was
going to happen, and without the uncertainty (game? Quiz? Silent reading?) he was
a lot calmer. I altered the rules of the warm-up game so that he wasn’t put in
an awkward situation that often arose. I added a baseball or soccer question to
every lesson because his knowledge of sports trivia is astronomical and I
wanted the other kids to see him shine. All small things, but they seemed to
make a big difference. Our classroom experience improved dramatically.
Then I was scheduled at other schools and didn’t come back
for a long time. When I came back, S wasn’t in class. I asked the teacher if he
was sick, but she told me that they had decided to send him to the special
needs classroom. She apologised for his “disruption” of class, as though all
the problems were his fault. It was devastating. I visit the special needs room
when I can, and he seems happier and more relaxed there. But he isn’t learning.
The special needs room is essentially day care. They draw and play bingo. The
teachers have no specialised training and often don’t know the specifics of a
student’s disability, illness or disorder: these are all lumped together; in
one special needs class I taught a girl who was just there because she needed to
a large piece of medical equipment that didn’t fit in the classroom, a boy with
ADHD, a girl with Down’s and a girl with a severe cognitive impairment. These
kids were being “taught” as one class. I’m happy that S is under less pressure
and is away from the bullies, but he is intelligent and capable and I feel like
his future is narrowing further and further every day because of choices his
teachers have been making.
It isn’t fair.
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