Botchan

Chapter 3

MY teaching began at last. When I entered the class-room and stepped upon the platform for the first time, I felt somewhat strange. While lecturing, I wondered if a fellow like me could keep up the profession of public instructor. The students were noisy. Once in a while, they would holler “Teacher!” “Teacher,”–it was “going some.” I had been calling others “teacher” every day so far, in the school of physics, but in calling others “teacher” and being called one, there is a wide gap of difference. It made me feel as if some one was tickling my soles. I am not a sneakish fellow, nor a coward; only–it’s a pity–I lack audacity. If one calls me “teacher” aloud, it gives me a shock similar to that of hearing the noon-gun in Marunouchi when I was hungry. The first hour passed away in a dashing manner. And it passed away without encountering any knotty questions. As I returned to the ​teachers’ room, Porcupine asked me how it was. I simply answered “well,” and he seemed satisfied.

When I left the teachers’ room, chalk in hand, for the second hour class, I felt as if I was invading the enemy’s territory. On entering the room, I found the students for this hour were all big fellows. I am a Tokyo kid, delicately built and small, and did not appear very impressive even in my elevated position. If it comes to a scraping, I can hold my own even with wrestlers, but I had no means of appearing aweinspiring, merely by the aid of my tongue, to so many as forty such big chaps before me. Believing, however, that it would set a bad precedent to show these country fellows any weakness, I lectured rather loudly and in brusque tone. During the first part the students were taken aback and listened literally with their mouths open. “That’s one on you!” I thought. Elated by my success, I kept on in this tone, when one who looked the ​strongest, sitting in the middle of the front row, stood up suddenly, and called “Teacher!” There it goes!–I thought, and asked him what it was.

“A-ah sa-ay, you talk too quick. A-ah ca-an’t you make it a leetle slow? A-ah?” “A-ah ca-an’t you?” “A-ah?” was altogether dull.

“If I talk too fast, I’ll make it slow, but I’m a Tokyo fellow, and can’t talk the way you do. If you don’t understand it, better wait until you do.”

So I answered him. In this way the second hour was closed better than I had expected. Only, as I was about to leave the class, one of the students asked me, “A-ah say, won’t you please do them for me?” and showed me some problems in geometry which I was sure I could not solve. This proved to be somewhat a damper on me. But, helpless, I told him I could not make them out, and telling him that I would show him how next time, hastily got out of the room. And all of them raised “Whee–ee!” ​Some of them were heard saying “He doesn’t know much.” Don’t take a teacher for an encyclopaedia! If I could work out such hard questions as these easily, I would not be in such a backwoods town for forty yen a month. I returned to the teachers’ room.

“How was it this time?” asked Porcupine. I said “Umh.” But not satisfied with “Umh” only, I added that all the students in this school were boneheads. He put up a whimsical face.

The third and the fourth hour and the first hour in the afternoon were more or less the same. In all the classes I attended, I made some kind of blunder. I realised that the profession of teaching not quite so easy a calling as might have appeared. My teaching for the day was finished but I could not get away. I had to wait alone until three o’clock. I understood that at three o’clock the students of my classes would finish cleaning up the rooms and report to me, whereupon I would go over the rooms. Then I would ​run through the students’ roll, and then be free to go home. Outrageous, indeed, to keep on chained to the school, staring at the empty space when he had nothing more to do, even though he was “bought” by a salary! Other fellow teachers, however, meekly submitted to the regulation, and believing it not well for me,–a new comer–to fuss about it, I stood it. On my way home, I appealed to Porcupine as to the absurdity of keeping me there till three o’clock regardless of my having nothing to do in the school. He said “Yes” and laughed. But he became serious and in an advisory manner told me not to make many complaints about the school.