It’s not a secret that there are people in every profession who are there for the wrong reasons. That goes for teachers, too, and I’m sure everyone can name at least one teacher they had that definitely didn’t like kids or teaching.

OP is young and motivated, and landed a job teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Japan right after graduation. She loves kids and loves teaching and would never intentionally make one of them cry.

She also has a class clown who can be extremely disruptive, and the school basically told her she was on her own for dealing with him.

I(20f) am an English teacher in Japan. I love my job and I absolutely love teaching kids. I’ve never made a kid cry until today.

I have a student, let’s call him Sam who’s 12. He’s the class clown who absolutely loves attention and will do anything to get his classmates to notice him.

Now, I have experience with plenty of goofy kids and I adore them. I let them joke around all the time unless they disturb other students the way Sam does.

Sam is super disruptive and makes other students uncomfortable to say the least.

I tried telling my boss and coworkers about this but they basically told me I’m on my own. Not even a call to his parents was made.

So, she separated him from the other boys, which helped.

Recently, I rearranged the seating so that Sam sat far away from the other boys as he does not do the same to the girls. This worked for a couple of weeks.

He spent most of the class complaining in a mumbled voice but he didn’t touch anyone.

Then, he took a new tactic and started calling her names in Japanese (not realizing she spoke it or that she was forbidden to speak it to him).

But I guess he got bored of complaining because today, he spent most of class hurling insults at me in Japanese. The class is mostly second English learning Japanese kids and since I’m hired as a foreign teacher, I am strictly forbidden from speaking to the kids in Japanese.

Anyways, when Sam starts calling me “disgusting”, “a stupid old lady” etc., I admit I got a little upset because I know for a fact he would not speak the same way to the Japanese staff and I knew telling him to stop would only make him want to do it more because I have tried multiple times in the past.

Instead, she pretended he was giving her compliments and she just didn’t understand, eventually frustrating him to the point that he cried.

So instead, in a loud voice I said “What did you say? きもい(disgusting)? What does that mean? Cute???? You think I’m cute??? Thank you!!!!”

The other kids laughed a little and Sam got angry but he kept trying to insult me throughout the class. I kept doing the same thing, pretending to think his insults were compliments.

In the end, he got so frustrated he burst into tears.

Another teacher acted like she had done a bad thing, but had she?

At the end of class, my coworkers saw that he was crying and I explained what happened. I got chastised for making a student cry.

Aita?

Reddit is weighing in!

The top comment says the school should have backed her up.

This fellow teacher says OP needs to consider what she will do next time.

They wish OP could contact the kid’s parents directly.

It’s a whole different world over there, though, and OP is at the bottom.

This experienced teacher says OP should not feel bad for a minute.

I think this was very clever, honestly.

I bet she’s going to be teaching for a long time. But maybe not in Japan.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.