Last class with third-years

The school year around here begins in April. Graduation, then, falls at the beginning of March. A month before graduation, the seniors are cut loose to take care of whatever business they have regarding their next step. For the university-track students, this means foregoing sleep for about 30 days in order to study their butts off for the college entrance exams. For the commercial-track kids, this means securing a job and taking it easy. This meant that my last class with my third-years was at the end of January.

I didn't see this coming, but it really was a blessing in disguise: their class has been by far my least favorite. It's not that the kids are bad or anything. It's just that the deck is stacked against me: there are 40 of them in each class; they've been bottom-of-the-barrel for two years in high school, meaning they haven't had any English oral communication practice; and they have absolutely no desire to learn English. I'm not trying to make excuses--I've definitely regarded the class as a challenge, not a lost cause. I just can't get anywhere with them. The teachers who work with me are pretty much my favorite English teachers, and they're very helpful with the lessons. They're honest enough to acknowledge there's no need for pushing the kids with textbook-related lessons, so they don't give me any pressure on that front. That leaves me with 50 minutes to spend literally playing English games with 17-year-olds.

Anyone in their right mind would be thrilled about that, since you'd expect the actual meat of a lesson to be the stressful part. With me, though, it's actually the other way around--I'm pretty comfortable creating and teaching the meat and potatoes of my lessons. It's the games that have given me fits. The English games I have the most fun with--charades, pictionary, catch phrase, taboo--are pretty straightforward word games. I've successfully sold a few of my upper-level first-year classes on pictionary and charades (taboo is in the works), but those have a maximum of twenty students. No matter how hard I try, I cannot figure out how to play one of those games (or many other games, for that matter) with forty low-English-ability students. If any of you can suggest anything, I'm all ears.

Anyway. Most of the games and activities in those classes wound up being activity sheets--word searches, crosswords, scrambles, etc. They dig those pretty well. For the last class, we did a mini-lesson on jobs. I made a handout with "What do you want to be when you finish school?/I want to be a __" and plenty of blank space. We had them choose something, write it in the blank, and then draw a picture below. I've been leery about doing things like that with the seniors--I know for a fact I and all the guys I knew were too cool to do stupid things like draw pictures when we were seniors. (Of course, I've since discovered the error of my ways.) As it turned out, though, they simply loved it. While a few of them didn't do much of anything, most of them spent the whole time on the drawings, and a few of them even went so far as to ask me how to say a job in English. "Airport baggage screener" was tricky, but I used enough caveman Japanese to get the point across. A few of the guys chose "army" (as in, "I want to be a army") and drew a scene more or less straight out of Rambo. Afterwards, we collected all the drawings. I've still got them in my desk drawer, bundled up. I take them out every now and then, when I need a laugh.

I was lucky enough to get a picture with them.