mugwump

I taught at a junior high in Japan that was like something out of one of those bad Hollywood Blackboard Jungle flicks. Kids riding bikes and letting off fire extinguishers in the hall, toilet seats ripped off and flung into the parking lot, broken windows on a daily basis. One class was particularly bad. If I tried to give hand-outs, the little shits would just rip them up and fling the bits around like confetti. One kid was trying to carve through his desk with an xacto-knife. Another had made a makeshift bow and arrow set and spent most of his time firing arrows into the the ceiling tiles, the curtains or the projector screen if it was down. Kids would climb out the windows, throw chairs, scream at the top of their lungs, run out of the class and generally behave like extras from Lord of the Flies. This was a team taught class so I had a Japanese teacher in there with me who was supposed to be responsible for discipline and translation of meta-language. He mostly just took a chair and sat in the back with the 14 year old girls he was hoping to molest though.

3 girls from the same school were arrested for pimping out some 13 year olds in a telephone dating service in Machida, Tokyo. Two kids took a baseball bat and brained the Lawson's convience store clerk because he wouldn't sell them ciggies. (one was arrested for murder 4 years later, but not before he and his buddies stole my scooter from my apartment, rode it to the beach and trashed it there while I was away on summer holidays). The PTA called an emergency meeting with the parents to discuss just how out of hand things were at the school. While the meeting was going on, the kids went out and pulled the wipers, mirrors, and hubcaps off most of the cars and threw them in the street. They then went into the teachers' office and threw books and chairs into the swimming pool.

Ahhh....memories......