Everything Old Is New Again: Part Four – Deprogramming The Coma Kids

Bruce Springsteen has become his recent tour for the Magic album but shouting the line “Is there anybody aliiiiiiiveee out there?” to the soon to be erupting audience. I felt like pulling a page out of the Boss’s book this week when I met The Coma Kids. Working this gig you do, at times, come across a kid who looks drugged. The are slow not mentally but just at, well, everything. These kids generally don’t join in for games and become lesson speed bumps when you get to them to answer a question or to repeat a sentence. Mainly this type of behavior is reserved for pre-teen or teenage girls. I would call them the Goths as the acted all mopy as they brooded about for their hour. Sometimes you get an entire class of these kids and that hour ticks away with the pace of Roseanne running the New York Marathon. Slow and grueling it is to teach kids who don’t speak or move. One might as well be teaching boulders or that kid that played Anikan in Episode One. Entire classes of these kids were rare, though, and when they did happen they were always in the older set where most of the kids don’t bother to show up or, if they do, it is late in the lesson. This week, the final stop on the new school tour in this wacky month that has been October, I discovered an entire school of what I have now dubbed The Coma Kids.

This school is the a three train school but all of them are timed well so that the ride is only about 45 minutes. The week is the most sparse one lesson wise on my schedule with two one hour days. The city itself, on the surface, is nothing special though I haven’t branched out to hunt about yet. It does rest in the shadow of a pretty group of mountains, one of which you can take a cable card to the top and visit a temple you can sort of see from the bottom if the day is clear. The class is located on the ground floor of an apartment complex which looks to double as a warehouse. As you approach you smell rubber, a powerful stink of rubber and it is coming from the large room next to the classroom door. Inside were boxes, maybe a hundred or more, filled with the same type of shoes. White, ladies sneakers with a pink trim. I wonder if these are manufactured for school uniforms. Either way, they are stored in this all purpose building. Apartments, shoe warehouse and English class. This is the Swiss Army Knife of apartment complexes. Kudos to those who can live there, I thought, with this smell and the screaming kids.

Only there were no screaming kids. When the first batch walked in on day one it was like the Village of the Damned kids had come for an English lesson. They were quiet, which I mistook as shyness, but then they just sat there and stared. It was pretty creepy. I was thinking they could have powers like that boy in the old Twilight Zone episode and should I not be able to appease them they’d transform me into a jack-in-the-box or, worse, one of those real ugly Pokemon. As the week moved on and all the classes started the same way I started to wonder what the hell were parents feeding these kids. Get them some caffeine, stat! Shyness is common upon first meeting a new teacher and some kids just pull back for the first lesson but all kids acting this way? I had been told the last teacher there kept things pretty still with little games and mostly sitting and doing bookwork. This might account for the stagnant nature. At one point I asked a group to stand up in the middle of the lesson and they looked at me as though I had a hamburger growing out of the side of my face. I actually found myself at one point snapping my fingers to get their attention. “Snap out of it” “Let’s go” “Come on”. They repeated perfectly, little Maya birds they were but the repetition was monotonous once again showing that these kids had been programmed into little learning zombies. I had a choice here. Obviously these kids were going to be well behaved if they just sat there dazed all lesson. I could keep things at this school strictly book based continuing where the last teacher had left off or I could change things up. After one lesson of the former I realized I would have no fun this way and these kids needed to be shaken up or else they might just turn to stone. I hammered into to them some of my most active games. It took a bit of coaxing to get them to join but soon these kids were being kids and racing around learning in an environment festering with fun. At least for me, anyway. As much as I’d have liked some of my crazier class to settle in the past I’d much rather insanely hoped up kids then kids that just gaze blankly at you. There is a belief that kids leaving your lessons out of breath and laughing are going to enjoy returning. This makes the Company happy, makes parents happy and so long as they don’t destroy each other it makes me happy. This was week one of deprogramming The Coma Kids. The expressions on the parent’s faces when I opened the door to a group of larboard breathed laughing kids was priceless.

And thus ends the four weeks in the new. Everything is now known such as what kids are going to drive me nuts (I don’t believe there are any this time around, to tell you the truth), what classes need more work, where the schools are and how to get to them. This is a much better hand of cards then the first one dealt to me. I stand behind that statement from a week or so ago now that the first round is over. My interest has been rejuvenated and should carry me through to the end in February. It’s almost over, folks. Only a few months left. I’ve started my preparations for the return home and as I look ahead to what that all means I think, man, where’s this road leading? Only way to find out is get out there and drive.