Gremlins In The Classroom or Channeling The Inner Montpetit

Remember that scene from Gremlins when our young heroes, Billy Peltzer –Gizmo in tow—and Kate Beringer stumble upon the evil Gremlins in hiding from the coming sunrise? Hundreds of those critters were corralled into a movie theatre and they were watching Snow White and Seven Dwarves, maniacs in movie seats. You had Gremlins with popcorn boxes on their heads, Gremlins with guns, Gremlins dressed in drag and all of them were beasts rampaging about the cinema obeying the primary directive of any Gremlin: if you can’t eat it, break it! If you remember this then you will also recall how subdued these creatures became the moment the famous Heigh-Ho song of the dwarves played out on the screen. They were enthralled, they were captivated and they were silent…for a few seconds. Then it was chaos again as all of the Gremlins became a macabre chorus of the song, shouting, gyrating in their seats, tossing popcorn and candy bar wrappers and each other around the room as though this were a Limp Bizkit show. (As a side note here, how did the Gremlins even know the words to the song? Hadn’t they just been born, so to speak, when Stripe fell into the pool at the Kingston Falls YMCA? Are Gremlins born with the knowledge of popular Disney songs?) “They’re watching Snow White…and they love it,” says Billy as he prepares to burn the critters to crisps. Our foes remain amused, though rowdy, until they catch a glimpse of Billy and Kate’s shadows on the movie screen and then all hell breaks loose and it is a mad Gremlin rampage, an onslaught of madness and fury and anarchy before the entire theatre explodes and mercifully it is over. This, my friends, was what teaching was like today. Gremlins not in a movie theatre, however, but in the classroom.

The flip side of my workload being light with the mixing of the classes this term is that classes have become larger with some reaching the maximum 12 students allowed under company size rules (although the rumor mill seems to indicate that this will soon be rescinded and raised to 16). Abandon all your preconceived notions of what a school classroom looks like if you are fixing to make the shift into this line of work. There are no desks here for the children to diligent sit attentively focused forward on the teacher at the head of the class. Our classrooms are pretty much the floor. Where Western teaching for any child after kindergarten veers away from game and craft orientated learning to more textbook and blackboard based teaching, here games are expect up until the late ages to maintain the fun atmosphere of the classroom promoted by The Company. There is an upside and a downside to this. The upside being, when you get a good bunch of kids, these games can be fun and indeed learning experiences for them. The key is making your game something they are unconsciously learning from, educational slight of hand, and they will have a grand old time all the while picking up the key phrases and sentences you are asked to pepper into your lesson games. The old manuals had games listed but these were open to interpretation so long as you managed to hit the learning target. The downside is when you get a wild bunch of heathens who are hopped up on enough sugar to fall an elephant the moment they walk through your door and onto your classroom ceiling. Even one of these kids can be the downfall to a good game as you have to constantly be mindful that they are not beating on some other child (this play fighting is very much a normal lesson disrupter here and I imagine kids here are prone to this kind of behavior because of the martial arts classes they take at a young age as it is generally the boys that try to dismember each other), trying to jump out of a window or have managed to find the class scissors and are attempting to give another student a mohawk. You find yourself having to pause what you are doing to go and straighten this kid out which interrupts the flow and, in turn, makes the other kids who were enjoying your lesson suffer because of it. Now, fill your room with 12 students and you are bound to have one of these kids and if you are the unlucky sort that I am you are bound to have about six of them, as was the case today.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out inventive ways to keep some of these kids under control. You might recall my prior disciplinary tactic of raising my voice to attract attention and then powering a well placed “NO”, arms crossed in the well understood X means No position by the Japanese kids, towards the child causing the disruption. Discipline, however, is a pretty none-existent word here in relation to working for this company. It’s like it is a naughty word. In training we were hardly given any foundation to deal with misbehaving kids and practically had to offer up multiple scenarios to get any type of preparation for kids needing disciplinary action. There are no principals here to send kids who get out of hand to. There are no hallways to place kids in to have them think about what they’ve done In fact one thing was perfectly clear in relation to the D word in training: you cannot give children timeouts. If you have a child who, say, punches another child in the face that little Mike Tyson cannot be placed in a corner or away from the group as punishment. The reasoning behind this all comes down to money as parents are paying good money to have their child educated by you for the hour and they expect them to be educated by you the entire hour regardless of how many other kids they precious hell beast may maim. If one were to search out the company online as I have you will find a recent turn towards the higher-ups actually telling teachers to see children as though they were dollar signs, keep them in your class no matter what the cost and salvage any potential lost revenue. I refuse to adhere to this ludicrous statement of “kids as customers” and continued forward in the job I was paid to do: educate them and teach them a little English that may help them later in life. Now, without a hallway, principal or time out at my disciplinary disposal I used the only other device at my disposal, The Angry Voice, and I honed this tactic by observing the best in the business: my daughter’s mother.

Steph has the perfect angry voice because her normal tone is fairly docile and sweet but flick her switch, back away, and watch out. She has the ability to rumble rooms with her shouts of disapproval, adding the middle name of the child for dramatic effect is a nice touch. The kids freeze instantly when they hear that voice as they know they have done something they should not have and if they are doing something they should not be they stop in their tracks. Steph never has to reach the count of one. I don’t believe in hitting kids nor do I believe in insulting them or offering them behavioral rewards to keep them in line. I am a firm disciple of Steph’s loud shout method because I have witnessed the results. Trying to capture Steph’s vocal range when she reaches those heights is not easy. It takes training. I would find myself setting up bottles in the backyard as a means to achieve this shouting plateau. You have to start at close range. You cannot become overzealous when it comes to attempting to knock down bottles in your backyard with your voice unless you are Georgia Brown. When you are knocking down bottles from a one foot range with ease slowly back away until you are slamming them down form twenty feet. This is not the full Stephanie but it is probably as close as you are going to get without formal training from the master. You are now ready. I remember first attempting this technique with my daughter years ago and obtaining a rolled eye expression that said: “Nigga, you ain’t got nothing on ma’ Mizzle!” (Five minutes later I am able to return to writing this as visualizing my daughter actually saying that had me in hysterics). Over the years I got better and the few times my daughter needed to hear the angry voice she knew she was dealing with the business end of dad’s mood and seldom would we need an encore presentation.

Armed with the master’s tutelage, should a child cross the line I was ready to shout, shout, get it all out as that is I thing I could do without…come on….I’m talking to you. Come on! Without principals, hallways or time outs this was really the only recourse I had at my disposal and use it I did. Now, don’t paint me as some sort of educational tyrant here, a Nazi of a teacher attempting to create obedient drones. I am actually fairly laid back when it comes to my dolling out of the ugly stick and it is not as though I am breaking out the Angry Voice bullet at petty crimes and misnomers. No, this was only to be used to stop violent behavior that could endanger other kids or myself. Again, Japanese kids love to play fight and they do so roughly. They also like to throw things as though they were ninja stars, jump on things as though they were trampolines, they like to stick their fingers up your ass or the asses of their friends and today I had my first encounter with near student nudity and although not endangering to the children it was certainly endangering to me. Imagine your superior were to walk in on a class of nude students. Hello deportation! After I informed this child to put his clothes back on, his lust for nakedness not fulfilled, he attempted to pants me. Boy, that takes me back to grade nine more than FaceBook ever will. Behavior such as this, as well the occasional voice raising when the kids are chatting, check that, screaming, amongst themselves and not listening to me would be where this sort of disciplinary retaliation would be warranted, I decided. The company did not agree. I admit openly that my first time with these students would be me at my strictest. My feeling was that in doing so I would lay down the law of the classroom early to show that I was not going to allow certain types of behavior and being new the kids would try to test me and find I was not an easy object to budge. The first month would find me at my loudest with the plan to lower the tone afterwards. This tactic worked and in my second go-round with the kids they were better behaved, for the most part, and their violent tendencies were less frequent. Sure, there were still some detractors but overall I feel the first lesson stricter voice raising me was a great success. The company did not agree. Somewhere along the line a child complained to their parent of my raising my voice to another student, another student, mind you, and not to them. The parent phoned head office. Head office phoned my superior. My superior visited me for a chat to, in essence, tell me he agreed that raising our voices was pretty much all we had, he totally understood my notion to be much more firm on my first outing and he also admitted this technique was successful when he witnessed it first hand in one of his hardest students of old now refined as one of the best students in the class but despite all this there were, and I quote, “icebergs in the water” and it would be in my best interest to tone it down.

Tone it down, I thought, okay, fine, this was my plan anyway but paranoia sets in and suddenly it feels as though my job is at risk with the next raising of my voice. Was there an octave of appropriateness? Where was the bar set? Again, discipline here is a bad word and you walk a thin line when it comes to addressing behavioral concerns. I decided that I would only tone it up under extreme circumstances where the kids could get hurt as though living and working here is not the be all end all of my existence there is still much I want to do in Japan and would like to last out my year. Of course, this is not to say that my want to be able to achieve my travel aspirations is going to cause me to become a jellyfish of a teacher who lets his kids run amuck like they were in a production of Lord of the Flies. I am just having to come up with other ways to keep the kids in check (although, trust me, just because I have been told to tone it down does not mean I won’t unleash an angry tongue lashing on a child who is physically abusive of others. This is the line I have set). New tactics I have been trying out: 1) softly banging a marker on the board and allow to raise to a crescendo that attracts even the loudest of students; 2) stopping the class dead cold, stone faced and staring with eyes that show zero approval and though this face attracts laughter at first I can hold it for the entire lesson if need be although I have only had to do so for a few minutes before the kids know that I am not joking; 3) no games and all books, something that fits perfectly into the new course outlines as if you get a rambunctious group who want to punch and kick as you try to get them to settle into a game you just remove that game altogether, have them sit back down, open their books and repeat the lesson objective; 4) whereas before I would give second chances to kids sitting near each other who decided to enter into jousting competitions with their pencil cases I now utilize the one strike and you’re out rule and will split them up at opposite ends of the group; 5) I will now pull a hostile child aside and have them read out loud the class rules, usually posted on one of the walls, a few times to hammer the point home; 6) I bring a cattle prod into the class and every so often just reach for it with wild eyes and a large evil grin. Okay, 6 is more of a fantasy but the others have been used and some work better then others and some don’t work at all depending on the class you get.

Case in point: Gremlins in the classroom. Finding yourself in the middle of an entire group of wild kids, most emulating the behavior of one or two influential beasts, found me failing at every turn when it came to using everything but a good old fashioned shout. Nothing worked. I suddenly heard Stephanie’s voice in the back of my mind: “Use your force, Luke” (The in my mind Stephanie calls me Luke) and despite the company urgings and the employment and travel risks, looking over at two boys engaging in a facial feature tug-of-war and a group of girls racing about the classroom nearly colliding with chairs, tables, walls and themselves my own internal voice spoke two words: “Fuck it”. Channeling my inner Montpetit the Angry Voice (although still turned down a few) caught the attention of the Gremlins who soon were back to work and maybe learning something. Back home The Angry Voice tactic for educators may not seem like a big gun but out here it’s like a tank and I am Patton at the helm. I will continue to suppress the Panzer that is the inner Montpetit until extreme entanglements warrant it but in the interim it is nice to know that it is still the best thing to use on the Gremlins in the classroom. If only it was as easy as opening a window and letting the sun shine onto ‘em.