Lazy Students in the Courtyard

Our school has this artificial turf courtyard that is located between the two main buildings of our school campus. It was installed about 4 years ago and was a big project for the former principal to gain status in the area.

Every day at lunch and after school kids gather around the turf courtyard to eat lunch and horse around as well as to practice after school activities like badminton, calisthenics and so on. The turf was an excellent idea to provide students a nice, clean place for gathering that will last years and years. Had real grass been used, kids probably would never play on it, and even if they did the grass would die.

So yesterday, three ３年生 (san nensei, third grade students), decided that they were going to piss the day off sleeping outside in the sunshiny turf courtyard. These three boys are really disgusting types of children, their hair is all colored, they have earrings, wear chains on their pants and all sorts of things.

Combined I think the three might have the average IQ of a donkey. They have no manners, are rude and crude to almost all they talk to and basically don’t belong in school. They belong on a chain gang in a prison if it were up to me to decide.

Anyway, so I had to teach four classes yesterday and each time I walked by the courtyard I’d see these three boneheads all sprawled out on the turf snoozing it up. They looked stupid to me, but they attracted the attention of several of their underclassmen. It was a sad sort of thing for them because I know what kind of life they will soon have. Drugs, unemployment, alcoholism, imprisonment, prostitution, and who knows what other fate awaits the three.

The really sad part was the teachers who sat outside and begged and pleaded with these boys to return to the classroom. But without the ability to met out physical punishment you can scream and yell, beg and plead until you are blue in the face and they won’t move. They know the game and they’ve become masters at manipulating it. This is why I am a firm supporter of physical punishment that’s highly structured and witnessed. Some children don’t respond to verbal threats and the only thing that they can understand is a good whack on their ass.

People who don’t support corporal punishment have either never taught or live in some fantasy world where all the kids are filled with sugar and spice. That’s why these three boys sat outside under the sun, in the middle of the courtyard without listening to what their teachers said even though those teachers spent their free planning periods begging them to get up and go back to the classroom.