KONNICHIWHAT!?: It takes all kinds

I've been here in Japan long enough to observe the various types of students that one can come across in this line of work. I haven't experienced all of them, but I have a good enough understanding, thanks to conversations with other teachers sharing their experiences, to give you all a nice little rundown! Fun-ward ho!

The middle-of-the-road student: This is your everyday, run-of-the-mill type of student who is usually well-mannered, knows what he's there (in the classroom) to do, doesn't give you any shit and goes with the flow of the lesson. These students are typically calm, don't go out of their way to brown-nose, but don't ignore you either.

The SUPER genki student: These students are incredibly loud and hyper (genki roughly translates into "good spirits", and not of the alcohol type). They constantly have to be told to quiet down, threatened with having game privileges taken from them, and generally just being more than any sane person can bare for longer than an hour.

The I-can't-be-bothered student: Ahh yes, these little gems. The ones that roll their eyes, whisper "mendoukusai" (which translates into 'annoying'), every time you try to get them to do something, and clearly would rather be anywhere than in your classroom.

The nightmare student: Well, these kids are pretty much monsters in children's clothing. They are loud, they don't want to be in your classroom, they could give a crap less that you're a foreigner trying to teach them English, they bully other students, they talk back and they don't use appropriate language.

The dream student: To be honest, they "types" are too few-and-far-between, but when you have one, you wanna hold on to them and keep them in mind whenever you're dealing with "nightmare" students or "I-can't-be-bothered" students. These students are the ones that make you want to go to class and basically do what you do. They're eager to learn, to try what they've learned and genuinely seem to enjoy being in your presence and the experience they're having.

The class clown student: Oh they students are found the world over and Japan is certainly no exception. These little turkeys are always trying to make the others laugh, usually pissing me off in the process, and to be honest, are usually more behind than the other students. Gee, why is that? Because they're too busy trying to be funny.

That's pretty much a fair rundown that covers all, or at the least the majority, of student types that you're bound to comes across with this gig. Now, as for me, with the three schools that I teach at, I'd have to say that I have mostly, "middle-of-the-road" students with a nice handful of "class clowns" and "SUPER genki" students thrown in just to keep things interesting. I do have one or two nightmare students, but it's literally just one or two so the numbers aren't high enough to ruin things completely. I also have a couple of dream students that I tend to look forward to teaching.

One of my fellow NT's has an entire class full of nightmare teenagers that don't listen to a word she says and just play with their phones instead of paying attention to the lesson. Another NT I work with just quit yesterday, after three years in the game, because he simply couldn't take "it" anymore. "It" being the disrespectful, lazy and whiny behavior from one of his schools. Apparently there was an incident the other day which served as the final straw for his camel-ish back. So yeah, it's definitely not all fun and games and the companies do a good job at selling you a pretty picture of what it's like to teaching Japanese kids English. It didn't take me long to realize I'd been sold a bill of goods. These kids aren't as respectful and nice as you thought they'd be and they're not as taken with seeing a foreigner as you might think either. Go figure.Lesson learned. Now you learned something as well!