July Keeps Getting Better and Better!

First it was the heat. Then came the attacks from the Kamikaze mosquitoes while I slept. Next was the rain, lots and lots and lots of rain. We began the month with inane lecturing from Company higher ups over even more inane complaints. There has been an earthquake. There has been a typhoon. There was even a nuclear leak. I’ve been confined to the house for the better part of 25 days, boiling, sweating, fighting off dive bombing bugs and now, this week, another bout of flue that has left me congested and wheezing. Did I mention the insomnia? All of the above has created a very, very cranky Nighthawk. July has been a month of “what nexts” and this question was finally answered today in the form of an extremely irate doctor.

I posted an entry early on describing my schools and talked about their locations and such. You may remember me mentioning how one school was located above a clinic. I don’t believe I elaborated much on this situation so allow me to do so now. The school is located in a long, brick building that also contains some offices and a hair salon called MaMa Hair. Yo’ Mama Hair would have been a better choice. Directly below the classroom is a clinic that operates during my lesson hours during the week. I skitter by on the weekends as the clinic closes just before my first lesson. The clinic, I have learned from my new angry doctor friend, that the place has been in operation for over 20 years while our school classroom has been in operation for just under 2. Now, let’s pause here and ponder to ourselves what an asinine idea it is to build a small, children’s classroom above a busy clinic. Was there any foresight involved here or was this just another Company cash grab? Certainly whomever leased the property to my current employer must have mentioned the neighbors below and even if for some reason this was not brought up you’d think the construction workers may have noticed the large word CLINIC printed in bright green on the windows below the classroom. Both classroom and clinic are separated by a balcony that stretches out over the clinic’s parking lot. This balcony is solid brick and concrete. Unfortunately this design didn’t carry over into the classroom itself where the floors were made of fairly thin wood. Over the last two years the doctors have complained constantly about the noise levels of lessons being taught above them and for the last two years nothing has been done to quell their complaints. I read some of these complaints in the book used to communicate between the Japanese teachers and foreign staff and the Japanese teacher at this school warned me of the clinic below back in February. Since then I have tried to keep my lessons at this school quieter then I would at my other schools. This is no an easy task, especially on Fridays. The youngest kids I teach all coral into class on Friday afternoon and these kids live on a diet of only sugar, sugar and chocolate with the caffeine of a dozen colas running through their little rambunctious bodies. They scream and they jump, behavior that is somewhat encouraged by the company in kids this young, and for over six months now I have managed to keep my lessons quiet enough to not have to warrant a visit from any of the clinic staff below. Today I was not so fortunate and it wasn’t even the younger kids that sent the Doctornator my way. It was, in retrospect, probably me.

My last class of the day is a group of twelve kids, the maximum amount that I teach, that are each about 9 years of age. This group is a mixed ability class, one of the hardest classes to teach. When you have two kids that like to goof off, one kid that likes to beat on the other kids, three kids who really want to listen, two kids who are very silent, one kid who really doesn’t want to join in and the rest of the kids looking as though they have no idea what planet they are on it makes for a very challenging lesson. You really have to balance how you teach so that all the kids get something out of your lesson. Not an easy task. Because of the mixed style of this class, most of the kids are struggling with basic concepts that other classes in their age group have already mastered. This bunch is about two steps behind. I believe this has happened because nobody knows quite how to educate this group, being so varied and all. I was included in this lot until last month when I discovered that turning my entire lesson into three big games without a focus on the bookwork aspect of things improved the learning atmosphere immensely. These kids can focus on the book so I hardly get them to look at it. Instead I use cards and drawings to help them along and, of course, these games. The best game I have invented, true not only of this class but most classes across the board, is a game called Gorilla Land. The Japanese kids love gorillas. This is one of the English words my kids say the most. Building on that love, I created Gorilla Land. The game is played in two teams of kids gathered around a square created on the floor with tape. I play the part of the gorilla and a large comfy dice are bananas. The kids have to pass the dice to one another over the square without me catching the dice. They also cannot step into the square or they become gorillas. When I catch the dice I ask a question pertaining to the lesson, the kids answer and we proceed. This game is such a simple one but has become such a big hit that kids actually request it and also stay behind after class sometimes to play it. Unfortunately Gorilla Land is the loudest game I play. The kids get really worked up over my antiques and I, too, get a little crazy as I monkey around. Sometimes I kick things up a notch and turn into Ninja Gorilla, flying around faster then before. The kids scream and jump and run and laugh and all of the above makes for an unhappy clinic below.

The knock on the door, check that, the loud pounding on the door came at the end of my lesson. I was just about to send the kids off. I actually thought it might be a parent as I had gone a minute or so over the usual lesson ending mark. When I opened the door there stood a red faced doctor in a green gown. His brow was furrowed, his cheeks puffing out in a fit of rage and his glasses bobbed up and down on his nose. I didn’t even have a chance to open my mouth before he started shouting, spit smacking me in the face. He moved closer as I stepped back, getting very confrontational an inch away from my face. I told him to back away and he did not and proceeded to jab my shoulder forcefully with his finger hard enough to leave a red mark hours after the confrontation. The kids didn’t seem to mind as they continued to play around with the dice but the parents that had gathered looked on with open mouths. None of them did anything but stare, though. I told the angry doctor that I didn’t speak Japanese so he shifted gears unexpectedly into some pretty good English. I was certainly this guy was about to take a swing at me so I started reaching for the nearest object for which to bludgeon him with should he make any attempt at such an attack. He wouldn’t step out of the doorway at first so I wasn’t able to let the kids out. This was my main concern. I wanted to get the kids out of there and the parents away from being witness to me getting chewed out. It was a touch embarrassing. Finally, after repeated requests, the doctor stepped out of the doorway and allowed me to let the kids out. With the kids and parents gone I decided that if this guy decided to continue this aggressive action I was going to clock him with a chair. The doctor explained how he is now past the point of complaining and wants something done, how it has been two years and so on and so forth. I let him rave and rant, basically in an effort to get him to calm down, and assured him I was trying to work with him on his concerns. I told him of our situation, how keeping kids in a small room silent for an extended period of time is not such a simple task, but this fell on deaf ears. “You have students. I have sick people.” He complained that the vibrations from above effect his work and are making his patients ill. I really couldn’t argue with the guy even if I wanted to…which I didn’t. I just wanted him to leave. Truth is, the guy is right. A kid’s classroom should not have been built above a clinic! I admitted this to him which eased him, something I think he needed to hear from one of the teachers here, and he finally calmed some. I stepped away from the chair. After some conversation about his situation and our situation I told him that I would talk to the company about this and try to reach some sort of agreement but he should also understand that small children will sometimes be loud. He agreed, shook my hand and left. I instantly got on the phone with my support team, still a little shaken over the incident, and expressed, expressed with extreme annoyance, that this situation needs to be resolved and that we, as teachers, should not be dealing with confrontational clinic staff. I told him that if an incident like this were to happen again I would not be coming back to the school until it was resolved. Having staff below me so irate compromises my safety as well as the safety of the students. They agreed. Finally, this company makes some sense…of course they have to do something which might be a little too much to ask of them. It’s a damn good thing that doctor didn’t cart along some surgical instruments. Add one more log of lunacy onto the fire that, at times, is this job.