It was my final week of being an English teacher. All of my colleagues now knew that I was heading back to the UK but none of the kids did.
Monday: My first lesson.
I had two types of lessons, 45-minute and 20-minute. I’d decided to break the news at the start of the 45-minute lessons but at the end of the 20-minute ones. However, in my first lesson of the week I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them. I snuck shamefully out instead, pretending that I’d be back again next week, as if everything was normal.
Aside from my cowardice there was also a lack of preparation on my part. I had not translated what I wanted to say into Japanese and, actually, even in English I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted. It was just a thank you, that it had been fun, that I would miss them and finally goodbye – but I wanted to say it with feeling because it wasn’t just a job for me.
My next lesson of the day was a 45-minute class of third years. After the initial greeting I braced myself and then delivered the news. I paused for a reaction, waited for the outcry but none came. In fact their faces did not even flicker a response, it was like they hadn’t understood or just plain didn’t care. I asked them if they understood, they nodded, they just didn’t care. I was quite taken aback.
My lesson that week was a combination of whatever spare games I had left and also a video of interesting places around the world. I made the video myself from downloaded Youtube videos. It featured Monument Valley, Victoria Falls and other areas of natural beauty as well as Machu Pichu, the tallest roller coaster in the world and scary deep-sea creatures. Having underestimated how long it would take to make I hadn’t actually slept between Sunday and Monday.
The video went down fairly well, except that the scary fish were perhaps a little too scary for the younger kids (The Gulper Eel is a real monster) and everything else was a disappointment after seeing a roller coaster climbing vertically skyward. During that second class on the Monday after we had watched the video there was a shuffling at the back of the room. The teacher of the class pulled something out from a drawer and two kids brought it forwards for me. It was a collection of letters from the kids, all sealed together with ribbon into a book. On the front cover was a picture of me: brown hair, blue eyes and bright red cheeks. “Ahhh so you already knew,” I said, relieved to discover a different reason for their cold response earlier on.
That book was the first of many I received from classes and for each one I gave a big smile and thanked them profusely. As the tower of books got bigger on my desk I started to worry about what I was going to do with them all. Then as an army of origami dinosaurs and cranes built up around the tower of books I got even more concerned.
This is a picture of all the stuff I got.
The response of the kids to my news was generally not very strong; they looked appropriately sad but that was all. There were no tears and I was glad because I didn’t want to be the cause of any. However, in a few of the classes the teachers cried a little which was touching but I wondered if it was for their own sadness or for some vicarious sense of the kids’ sadness.
The worst moment of the week was at the end of a first grade class. The teacher of the class began to shed a few tears and the kids shouted out, “Ehhh, she’s crying!” As my lesson had pretty much finished, the class teacher took over the class again. She knew that I didn’t have another lesson immediately and got all the kids to stand up and take out their recorders. They played something for me, Puff The Magic Dragon.
No matter what Meet The Parents says about this song it is beautiful and truly sad.
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.
His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave
I used to listen to it as a child; we had it on tape so as they played my mind filled in the words. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” became my internal mantra, “if I cry then that will start them off and then everyone will feel terrible.” Imagine it, thirty 6-year-old kids starring at you from behind recorders, playing a song about abandonment and the end of childhood and all for you; you who is abandoning them. You bastard.
Suddenly everyone wanted me to sign things for them. Previous to that week only two classes had ever asked for my autograph but now they all wanted my signature on books, pencil cases, bags and even school hats. My black marker pen hovered over each hat I was given. “Won’t your mum be cross?” I asked them.
“Probably,” they said smiling.
The sweetest moment was when a girl gave me a little origami version of the character Kirby. She said, “He’s my favourite character and I’m giving him to you because English were my favourite lessons.” Fortunately the response, “Awwwww” works in all languages.
Class 2-3 were a special class for me because they had been the first kids I had met at the school; Hell some of them had even tried to insert their fingers into my posterior. My relationship with them was especially jokey; it had to be really. The lesson I’d prepared wasn’t very good and in it we had been using tiny dice. They were tiny because I had bought them, 50p for eight. One of my favourite students, a boy called Naito was in floods of tears at the end of the lesson. I thought those tears were for me but they were because he had lost one of the dice instead.
At six years old you can tell how developed kids are by the way they move. The kids who sit with their mouths open and blank expressions, who seem to move awkwardly and without purpose are lagging behind the others. Naito was one of the kids who it was easy to tell that he was there, in his head all settled and comfortable. He may have been shy and quiet but he that was because he knew it.
Some time ago I found him lying on the ground outside during breaktime. He had hurt his knee and was clutching it tearfully but not doing anything about it. Other kids, his friends I suppose, were standing around indecisively until they decided to be cruel. One boy had been hurling around his coat, throwing onto the ground as if it were some strange creature that he had just noticed clinging to his back. It was covered in sandy dirt and he held out so that the dirt dribbled from his coat and onto Naito's face. I pushed the coat aside and got one of the other boys to get a teacher.
I did everything I could to reassure Naito that he didn’t have to worry about the lost die but he continued to cry. Towards the end of the week he came to the Teachers Room with some of the other kids, a smile on his face and the die in his hand.
Once everyone knew I felt much better. I had been planning to leave for months; it had been my guilty burden. Now I could get on with appreciating the last few days of being Nick Sensei.
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