If it helps, I've been teaching JHS kids for a year already, talked to many teachers at my school and a few at other schools about it, and actually, this is just the way things are -- the cute 7th-graders, awful 8th-graders, and fine 9th-graders. There's a phrase in Japanese about the 8th-graders which means something like "At the bottom of the dip". 7th-graders are cute and fun for about the first 4 months of the year, then some of them remain cute and fun for the rest of the year and some of them start taking an attitude (in my school, the boys are the bad ones). 8th-graders are just monsters -- they feel old enough to boss around the 7th-graders, and free enough to do whatever they want, but since there is no pressure on their heads yet to apply to high schools, they don't really care about studying all that much for the most part. And of course, there's puberty, although I don't think that accounts for all of them being monsters. 9th-graders have to apply for high school, so even the worse students of them tend to be a little more serious about things, because they know that they need to get good grades AND pass tests AND get teachers' recommendations and so on in order to get into a good high school. And I think the 9th-graders feel like they need to be school leaders and be responsible for things here. At my school, last year, there were more bad girl 9th-graders than boys, but this year the bad 9th-graders are almost all boys, although in general we don't have that many truly bad kids in the 9th-graders this year. But we also don't have any truly amazing ones... last year we had some truly amazing 9th-graders and some truly awful 9th-graders. I still miss a lot of the kids who graduated last year, and I cried my eyes out at graduation.
I have a few sets of brothers/sisters in the school though, and last year there was a pair of brothers where the 9th-grader was an amazing kid to work with, very sharp, tried very hard in class, etc. He apparently was so bad as an 8th-grader that his parents had to come in and bow to the Board of Education after an incident where he had destroyed property at a regional sports day, but he apparently totally changed in 9th grade. His brother, who was in 8th grade last year, was a total monster. I asked him once why his brother was so great and why he sucked so much, and he said "My brother has to go to high school next year. I don't. So please go drop dead." This year, said younger brother is now a 9th-grader and while he is still a jerk to teachers and students, he has at least managed to learn how to sit still for an entire class period. I consider that an improvement.
What makes me sad is how a lot of last year's cute and fun 7th-graders have infact become 8th-grade monsters this year. And it IS amazing how discipline works here -- or the lack of it. I've been told I work at a particularly bad school, and we are kind of in the ghetto of Tokyo (we get police reports fairly regularly telling us to patrol the area because there was a robbery nearby or a crazy person running around or various things, none of which is as bad as being in the ghetto of the USA but is still not what most people envision as normal Japan), but it is amazing how being sent to the principal's office is nearly unheard of. I had a kid threatening classmates with the needle from his compass and nobody seemed to care at all.
What I did find though is that the best thing to do is to get to know as many students as possible. It sounds like you are at a huge school so maybe that isn't as easy, but a lot of these kids have gone through a while of having ALTs who have no clue who any of them are and don't care. Once the kids realized I knew their names, clubs, siblings, favorite bands or movies, etc, and that I understood Japanese, a lot of them opened up more to me. Of course, that might just be because they know I can tattle on them to their homeroom teachers, but still.
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If it helps, I've been teaching JHS kids for a year already, talked to many teachers at my school and a few at other schools about it, and actually, this is just the way things are -- the cute 7th-graders, awful 8th-graders, and fine 9th-graders. There's a phrase in Japanese about the 8th-graders which means something like "At the bottom of the dip". 7th-graders are cute and fun for about the first 4 months of the year, then some of them remain cute and fun for the rest of the year and some of them start taking an attitude (in my school, the boys are the bad ones). 8th-graders are just monsters -- they feel old enough to boss around the 7th-graders, and free enough to do whatever they want, but since there is no pressure on their heads yet to apply to high schools, they don't really care about studying all that much for the most part. And of course, there's puberty, although I don't think that accounts for all of them being monsters. 9th-graders have to apply for high school, so even the worse students of them tend to be a little more serious about things, because they know that they need to get good grades AND pass tests AND get teachers' recommendations and so on in order to get into a good high school. And I think the 9th-graders feel like they need to be school leaders and be responsible for things here. At my school, last year, there were more bad girl 9th-graders than boys, but this year the bad 9th-graders are almost all boys, although in general we don't have that many truly bad kids in the 9th-graders this year. But we also don't have any truly amazing ones... last year we had some truly amazing 9th-graders and some truly awful 9th-graders. I still miss a lot of the kids who graduated last year, and I cried my eyes out at graduation.
I have a few sets of brothers/sisters in the school though, and last year there was a pair of brothers where the 9th-grader was an amazing kid to work with, very sharp, tried very hard in class, etc. He apparently was so bad as an 8th-grader that his parents had to come in and bow to the Board of Education after an incident where he had destroyed property at a regional sports day, but he apparently totally changed in 9th grade. His brother, who was in 8th grade last year, was a total monster. I asked him once why his brother was so great and why he sucked so much, and he said "My brother has to go to high school next year. I don't. So please go drop dead." This year, said younger brother is now a 9th-grader and while he is still a jerk to teachers and students, he has at least managed to learn how to sit still for an entire class period. I consider that an improvement.
What makes me sad is how a lot of last year's cute and fun 7th-graders have infact become 8th-grade monsters this year. And it IS amazing how discipline works here -- or the lack of it. I've been told I work at a particularly bad school, and we are kind of in the ghetto of Tokyo (we get police reports fairly regularly telling us to patrol the area because there was a robbery nearby or a crazy person running around or various things, none of which is as bad as being in the ghetto of the USA but is still not what most people envision as normal Japan), but it is amazing how being sent to the principal's office is nearly unheard of. I had a kid threatening classmates with the needle from his compass and nobody seemed to care at all.
What I did find though is that the best thing to do is to get to know as many students as possible. It sounds like you are at a huge school so maybe that isn't as easy, but a lot of these kids have gone through a while of having ALTs who have no clue who any of them are and don't care. Once the kids realized I knew their names, clubs, siblings, favorite bands or movies, etc, and that I understood Japanese, a lot of them opened up more to me. Of course, that might just be because they know I can tattle on them to their homeroom teachers, but still.