transferred somewhere else. A lot of kids were glancing around at Sh ū ya through all of this, but he just sat there looking at the teacher like some honor student—though you could tell he wasn’t really listening, either. Werther didn’t seem to notice one way or the other and just charged on.
“This is the first day of my first teaching job, so you, members of B Class, are my first-ever students! And since I’m new, I want you to be able to start fresh, too, so I’ve decided that I’m not even going to read the files your first-year homeroom teacher left on each of you. I want you to feel like this is a new beginning, and I want you to think of me as a big brother, as someone you can talk to about anything at all.”
They always extend homeroom that first day before the opening ceremony, and Werther had talked for what seemed like forever. But finally he wound things up by taking out this brand-new piece of yellow chalk and writing on the board in huge letters:
ONE FOR ALL! ALL FOR ONE!
I don’t really know what you thought of us—as individuals, I mean. And I can’t imagine what you might have written about Naoki and Sh ū ya in those files. But if Werther had bothered to read them, I bet none of this would have happened.
Naoki was absent day after day, and none of us said a word to Sh ū ya, but things were pretty calm going into the middle of May. It wasn’t like we were all being mean to Sh ū ya or hated him or anything—more like everyone had just decided that he didn’t even exist. We all got really good at avoiding him, just like we got used to ignoring the stifling feeling in the classroom.
One night they played this show on TV that was about a middle school, and they mentioned that some class had decided to use the homeroom period as reading time. They said that just those ten minutes a day had improved the students’ attitude and helped with their ability to focus, and that the kids actually improved academically. As I was watching, I thought about Sh ū ya .
The next day, there was a new “library” in the back of the homeroom class. Werther had brought this little bookshelf and a whole bunch of books from home.
“I know they’re a little dog-eared, but I want us all to start reading every morning and getting absolutely everything we can out of life!” Werther told us. Like everything he said, this sounded pretty dorky, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea…until we went to look at the titles of the books. I have to tell you that most of us had started to get used to Werther by this point—maybe even liked him a little. He is pretty good-looking, after all. But after that we could never take him seriously again. You see, one whole shelf of the case was filled with books by your friend Sakuranomi-sensei, Manami’s father.
I guess Werther couldn’t help noticing that we weren’t impressed with his little library. Maybe that’s why he took a book off the shelf when we were doing problems in his math class later in the day and started reading to us.
“… I was never interested in religion, but as I wandered around the world, going from country to country, somehow I started carrying the Bible with me. There’s a verse in Matthew 18 that talks about a man who has a hundred sheep. Now if one of those sheep is lost, the man will leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go looking for the one; and if he finds it, he’ll take more pleasure in the sheep that was lost than in the rest that did not go astray. Now to me, that’s the definition of a true teacher…” At that point, he closed the book. “Let’s forget about math for today and have a class meeting,” he said, his voice getting really quiet and almost churchlike or something. “I wonder if we can’t put our heads together and think what to do about Naoki.” I guess he suddenly realized that Naoki was a lost sheep. Anyway, he had us put away our math books without even checking the answers to the
“This is the first day of my first teaching job, so you, members of B Class, are my first-ever students! And since I’m new, I want you to be able to start fresh, too, so I’ve decided that I’m not even going to read the files your first-year homeroom teacher left on each of you. I want you to feel like this is a new beginning, and I want you to think of me as a big brother, as someone you can talk to about anything at all.”
They always extend homeroom that first day before the opening ceremony, and Werther had talked for what seemed like forever. But finally he wound things up by taking out this brand-new piece of yellow chalk and writing on the board in huge letters:
ONE FOR ALL! ALL FOR ONE!
I don’t really know what you thought of us—as individuals, I mean. And I can’t imagine what you might have written about Naoki and Sh ū ya in those files. But if Werther had bothered to read them, I bet none of this would have happened.
Naoki was absent day after day, and none of us said a word to Sh ū ya, but things were pretty calm going into the middle of May. It wasn’t like we were all being mean to Sh ū ya or hated him or anything—more like everyone had just decided that he didn’t even exist. We all got really good at avoiding him, just like we got used to ignoring the stifling feeling in the classroom.
One night they played this show on TV that was about a middle school, and they mentioned that some class had decided to use the homeroom period as reading time. They said that just those ten minutes a day had improved the students’ attitude and helped with their ability to focus, and that the kids actually improved academically. As I was watching, I thought about Sh ū ya .
The next day, there was a new “library” in the back of the homeroom class. Werther had brought this little bookshelf and a whole bunch of books from home.
“I know they’re a little dog-eared, but I want us all to start reading every morning and getting absolutely everything we can out of life!” Werther told us. Like everything he said, this sounded pretty dorky, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea…until we went to look at the titles of the books. I have to tell you that most of us had started to get used to Werther by this point—maybe even liked him a little. He is pretty good-looking, after all. But after that we could never take him seriously again. You see, one whole shelf of the case was filled with books by your friend Sakuranomi-sensei, Manami’s father.
I guess Werther couldn’t help noticing that we weren’t impressed with his little library. Maybe that’s why he took a book off the shelf when we were doing problems in his math class later in the day and started reading to us.
“… I was never interested in religion, but as I wandered around the world, going from country to country, somehow I started carrying the Bible with me. There’s a verse in Matthew 18 that talks about a man who has a hundred sheep. Now if one of those sheep is lost, the man will leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go looking for the one; and if he finds it, he’ll take more pleasure in the sheep that was lost than in the rest that did not go astray. Now to me, that’s the definition of a true teacher…” At that point, he closed the book. “Let’s forget about math for today and have a class meeting,” he said, his voice getting really quiet and almost churchlike or something. “I wonder if we can’t put our heads together and think what to do about Naoki.” I guess he suddenly realized that Naoki was a lost sheep. Anyway, he had us put away our math books without even checking the answers to the
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