Cry babies
Why is it that I have one student get injured or crying in almost every single elementary school class I have, regardless of age? How does that happen? I blame Genki English death games, because otherwise I'd have to blame myself. Seriously, today I know the game was a little crazy, but two kids got smacked in the eye because apparently the people I picked to chase the others were savages and loved tagging people in the head.In another class, I had some students, none of which were the taggers just beating the hell out of each other when everyone started running. It was like a scene from Cops as one kid was on the ground, 'yelling stop, don't kick me there!' and the other kid just maliciously laughed. The other class where I decided I had enough crying I decided I would try to just do a coloring activity for most of class, but an adorable little girl started crying when I started turning people into objects with my 'wand' and I turned her into a frog. Come on, the little cute pudgy kid I turned into mochi took his change with much more grace. I just can't win.
In my last class, I had shogakko 6th graders writing letters to pen pals in America. Tell me please how that would evoke one kid to grab his neighbors head and start smacking him repeatedly? At least nobody cried that class. Maybe it's the new form of a cool handshake, ass whooping.
Perhaps I've just never noticed when I was in Junior High School if there were a lot of people with broken bones all the time, but here it seems like kids break their bones a lot. When I ask kids how they broke their wrist or arm, the most common response seems to be, 'I fell down the stairs.' Where back home I would question that answer, here I just shrug and say, ' be careful walking.'
One thing I have to say about Japanese kids though is they are tough as all hell. Despite the crying and breaking of bones, they really 'gambare' their way back to whatever they are doing and try to recover as quick as possible. I did an English camp for kids not to long ago and I had the youngest group. More than half of the group was sick with the flu and a few got injured along the way. The most serious injury was one 9 year old girl who walked smack into a locker and split her eyebrow part open. Anyway, she was back later that evening smiling and saying how she got five stitches and got to see her mom at the hospital. Most of the fluish kids kept refusing to admit they were ill saying they were fine so they could stay. What gambare-spirit.
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