The Gorilla Says Goodbye

I didn’t think I’d become attached to some of the kids I teach. When I teach it is really entering into a different zone. You go into the classroom, prepare your materials and in come the kids and for an hour I enter a groove and I roll with it. Sometimes it really is like some sort of out of body experience as when the door closes on the last lesson I look around at the now scattered teaching materials inside an empty classroom and I think: “Alright, what just happened here?” A lot of what I do is performance. You put on a grand production to get the kids interested in what you are trying to teach them and like any good show the more entertaining it is the more interest will be shown by your audience. After the show I return to the apartment and leave the work at work…for the most part. I don’t think of teaching on my days off and I try to leave the classroom inside the classroom. I know I have been a touch on the negative side at times here when it comes to writing about the students but, in truth, there are only a few bad seeds and most of my kids are great. I discovered today that leaving some of them was not going to be easy…especially the one’s who had grown attached to me. This departure is coming early with the move to the different teaching unit in the next two weeks. I wasn’t expecting to go through this until February of next year. This week’s lessons are the first of the last. I would not be returning to this school (incidentally the crazy doctor school) on a regular basis (I might be asked to sub or team teach there) and I’d be seeing these kids for the last time as their teacher. Let me tell you at least five of these kids are welcome terrors out of my life but that’s a very small group. The bulk of my students are middle ground kids. I teach them, they don’t cause any problems and we’ve not established anything more then a cordial classroom report. The bad kids are the bad kids. You dread them when you head into the classroom and you loath them when they walk out. But the other group, the smaller of the Trilogy of Student Types, are the kids who you feel generally adore you as their instructor. These are the kids that smile when they see you, ask you for high fives, the younger ones may sit on your lap if they are feeling insecure, they laugh the loudest at your antics and really enjoy your lessons. I have a few students where I feel I am a sort of big brother to them. One kid I know is an only child and he is always early to class to show me some new Yu-gi-oh! cards he’s collected or just to play my tennis game before others start arriving. There’s just a vibe, maybe I’m misreading, but you get the feeling that some of the kids just might be looking up to you. These are the ones that were hard to say goodbye to. I wasn’t going to say anything at first, just leave and a new teacher would be there the next time but I didn’t think that to be fair to the kids who had been with me now for over half a year, to just vanish like that. I didn’t think the younger kids would understand so I told a few parents and left it at that but the older kids I explained that I was leaving to teach at other schools and that they would have a new teacher next time. I eyed some of the terror children and said “Please be good.” They smiled sinister smiles. I mostly received blank expressions with my announcements. They didn’t understand me and my Japanese wasn’t enough. Yet there were a few kids who came to me before leaving to offer me a sad “bye bye”. Man, it’s good that I’ve only been around for six months because if it had been the full year I might have actually squirted a few tears. I’d become attached after all. I can only hope I made some kind of mark on their education during my short time with them and that they take away something from that time period to help them later on. In the end I think I will be remembered as Gorilla Sensei, the guy who grunted and bounced around during a game the kids went, excuse the pun, ape for. Students will come in and call me Gorilla, sing little songs about me being a gorilla and at any inclination that I might start acting like a gorilla would send them into histerics. One kids when saying goodbye yesterday said: “See you On-door-eh,” a slight pause, “GORILLA!!!!!!!!” and in a fit of laugher they waved and left. My lasting legacy places me in the company of hairy primates. Well, a legacy is a legacy. I’m suddenly hungry for bananas.