Category: University Life

I’m resuming my report of last semester with the law students.

Law is a major that has evolved in terms of the personality of its students. It used to be a boring class. Students were serious—too serious—and, more importantly, too quiet. Some were just quiet and/or shy—not all want to be lawyers; many end up becoming office workers—but some were “passive-aggressively” quiet.
A few years ago, I taught an advanced class, and it was difficult to engage them. I thought I was unlucky and had ended up with a class full of shy students. Then one day, I ran into some of them in the “International Café” on campus. They were chatting with foreign students in fluent English. They just didn’t want to bother being active in my class.

However, law students have become livelier and friendlier over the past few years. Last year, they were probably my friendliest class.
This year, it felt like I had two different classes in the same room.
First, some majors — including law students — tend to segregate themselves by gender. This was the case this semester, too. Usually, and unsurprisingly in a country like Japan, the boys take up most of the space in the classroom, while the girls tend to huddle together. But this year, for some reason, it was the opposite. Despite the fact that the class was 60% boys and 40% girls, the girls occupied two-thirds of the classroom, while the boys squeezed into the remaining third. I’m not sure how it happened.

Everyone was friendly, but the boys were definitely a shy bunch. They were shy around the girls and with English, but not with each other, at least not in this configuration.
So I guess it worked. The downside is that while I got to know the girls a little, the boys were just one group to me. Apart from a few exceptions, I had a hard time seeing them as individuals. I’m already starting to forget some of them, despite the last class being a week ago. (I originally wrote this right at the end of the semester.)

Hello everyone,

I’m Wolf. I teach English at a Japanese university, and Gator convinced me to contribute to his new blog. I’ll write about university life and other topics when I have the time.

I wrote this first series of short posts at the end of last semester, sometime during the last week of July or the first week of August 2025.

Let me know what you think.

Another semester is coming to an end. It was actually a pretty odd semester for a few reasons.

First, let’s review my first-year classes. As a reminder, first-year English classes in the spring semester are TOEIC practice classes. In other words, they’re difficult and boring, and in my opinion, they’re the worst way to start upper-level English education at the university.

However, Japan loves its standardized tests, so we have to go through the motions each spring. For some reason, though, this year’s TOEIC classes were more pleasant than in the past.

Let’s start with my engineering students.

Most of them dislike and struggle with English. You might be surprised by this, since they’re probably the majors who will need English the most in their professional lives. I was surprised too when I started at this university. Now, I’m used to it.

Usually, everyone is quite passive in class. This is also the only class where I sometimes have discipline problems. Some boys who were popular in high school think they can control the class, but they don’t realize that they not the big fish in the small pond anymore. They usually understand they’re just small fry after a few weeks, especially in my class. This year, however, everyone was nice and friendly. The only problematic student was what I call a “zombie student.” Seriously, he seemed brain-dead most days. I suspect he’s the kind of kid who plays video games all night, wasting his parents’ money and missing out on an education because he’s too sleepy during the day.
Those kids make me sad, but there’s nothing I can do for them. I feel I can have an impact on every other type of student, but they need to get their act together before I can do anything.
Sometimes, though, a student is “actively” passive and unresponsive in the hope that I’ll leave them alone (it probably works in high school). While I never fully ignore them, it’s true that I won’t waste my energy on them.

Apart from him, everyone behaved nicely. Interestingly, one of the weakest students—the kind who usually spends class time “hiding” and hoping I forget about them—was one of the friendliest. He really did try his best. He barely passed the class. I was afraid he wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t have succeeded with a different attitude.

But those two students were the only memorable ones in this class. There was one boy who almost started giving me a hard time at the beginning of the semester, but he ended up trying his best most days and being much nicer as the semester went on. There was also a girl who was very nice but always looked like she had just rolled out of bed. It wasn’t really her attitude; it was just the vibe she gave off. Her weird makeup, which seemed to emphasize the dark circles under her eyes instead of hiding them, didn’t help. It’s hard to describe, but it’s becoming popular in Japan these days. It’s definitely not a good idea when you actually have under-eye bags.

However, don’t let the description of the class fool you. Despite the much better mood than usual, the results were worse. They didn’t study much — this class never studies much — and I’m afraid lifting a policy that would have made them automatically fail if they scored below a certain TOEIC threshold didn’t help. Seven students (out of 25) didn’t reach the required score. It’s a first.

This was the first part. I’m not sure if you find this interesting or not.

The next post will be about my law students.