Notes on My First Year of Teaching
On School Life
Always assert dominance over the students. Acting like their friend is weakness.
Chew out students with bad grades. Show no mercy. It’s their fault.
Treat students in the better classes with kid gloves. Their success is invaluable.
Keep students on a direct path to passing their entrance exams.
Clubs are a privilege. Work with advisers to encourage bad students (anyone with failing grades) to drop out.
Confiscate all cell phones spotted on campus. Make the owners come to the faculty office and apologize.
On Classes
Keep things tense by scolding students. Do not let them talk among themselves.
Make an example of students who fail, writing their names on the board. (Make them want to pass.)
If anyone falls asleep, dole out some form of punishment.
On Homework
Start classes by checking progress.
Call out the names of anyone below 50 percent submission. (Use full names.)
Make anyone below 25 percent stand up in front of the class.
Anyone close to 0 percent requires personal attention. (Use the student guidance office, with at least one other teacher attending.)
On Summer Lessons
Ensure the majority of students in your homeroom attend. (The quota is 85 percent.)
Keep a list of non-applicants on the board. We do this every year.
Hint that students might fail or be held back. Suggest they’ll be left behind if they don’t attend.
Teacher evaluations will be affected by participation rate.
The teacher in charge of summer lessons should keep tabs on all classes and report to the head teacher for their grade.
This is messed up.
I don’t want to yell at students. But if I don’t, the head teacher yells at me.
Is this the norm at private schools? I don’t know, but I’m miserable.
Can I just quit? But I was so happy to find work; how can I just give up?
Getting chewed out by the head teacher, shouting at the students… What am I even doing? What’s the point?
This is killing me. Please just leave me alone. Don’t force me to do everything your way and take all the blame.
I don’t want to tell kids to drop dead. I don’t want to hear it, either. I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.
✦ ✦ ✦
“……”
Kurumi just sat there with the planner in her hands.
She’d read it. All of it.
Her eyes darted up and down, scanning back and forth across the page.
Her reaction came as a relief. She must feel the same way I did. We’d been on different pages once before, but not this time. Thank God.
I’d been thinking the same thing on a loop the whole way home, and just as I’d planned, I laid it on her. I spoke slowly, so as to avoid any potential misunderstandings.
“Kurumi, before we started venting our frustrations with the summer program, and before we decided to outdo Nanaougi, our goal was to ensure that no one else wound up like us. Right?”
“…True.”
“Before vacation—when we planned the attack on the festival—I got that wrong. I thought ‘like us’ meant everyone in the lower-ranked classes. That’s why I suggested calling off that attack and wound up hurting you.”
“…Yeah.”
“I don’t want to make that mistake again, Kurumi. So this time, I’m asking you properly.”
“……”
“This is a teacher suffering under Saigou High’s rules, her boss screaming at her. Is she ‘like us’? Is she the kind of person we want to save?”
Kurumi looked me right in the eye and began flapping her lips soundlessly. She had something to say, but she couldn’t find the words. She would start to say something, then swallow it back down, over and over again.
After a long time, her shoulders slumped, like she’d given up. A self-mocking smile crossed her lips, and she took a deep breath.
“Wow… That’s a tough one. You may well be right.”
“…I was afraid of that.”
The idea had never occurred to me. Or perhaps I’d just never let myself consider it.
I’d convinced myself that all teachers were bad—that they didn’t matter.
But reality was never that easy. There were teachers forced to follow the rules laid out in this planner. They suffered pangs of conscience, but their bosses browbeat them into reluctantly matching what the rest of the faculty did.
We took these teachers, trapped in a bind between their job and their morals, and pummeled them with our attacks.
I had no regrets. I didn’t think what we’d done was wrong. I was sure of that. And yet…
And yet there was one thing I had to admit—an unshakable fact.
Kanae Ookuma was legitimately a victim of our attacks.
We’d been striking out against the very idea of school, and we hadn’t really considered how scary it was to actually hurt people. Now we were being forced to confront that, and it hit me like a knife to the heart.
“Problems like this, that aren’t black and white, are the toughest to deal with.” Kurumi put the planner down and sighed. “Who is our real enemy? I don’t think it’s Ookuma. But it probably isn’t the head teacher, either… If I had to give an answer, I’d say we’re up against the school itself.”
“…Yeah, I agree.”
“But in that case, what should we be doing?”
Her words floated gently through the air but hit me like a stone. They resonated with me so strongly that it hurt.
She was absolutely right.
From the moment we leaped off the roof, we were past the point of giving up on our attacks.
But we had reason to sympathize with Ookuma. She was caught between a rock and a hard place. Her situation wasn’t black or white, and that sucked. These shades of gray were making me sick.
We didn’t want to hurt anyone like us. The concern we’d pushed aside once before had come back to haunt us. This was no time to worry about Nanaougi.
This teacher had longed for the release of death, just as we had. We couldn’t simply ignore her.
We had a choice to make.