The following day, the students sat at their newly clean and tidied desks. They had been told to bring their textbooks with them, as Nagisa-sensei would be teaching out of them for the first time, though in truth, only a handful of students actually followed that instruction.
Most of the class was already present, with the exception of Asui, who always seemed to show up late; and Kiya, who practically never attended at all.
Nagisa himself was also missing, which the students took as an opportunity to talk about him behind his back.
"Man, Nagisa-sensei is such a bitch!" Hinata complained, sitting on his desk, flipping his shaggy, black hair behind his shoulder with a short toss of his head. "I can't believe she made us clean this whole freaking classroom yesterday! That was ridiculous!"
"Right?" Ippantekina grumbled in agreement. His slouching posture did nothing to combat his hoodlum appearance. "My arms are still sore from cleaning all the windows. I wouldn't have done shit, if she wasn't such a creepoid."
"You've gotta admit, though," Kurra said, letting his blue-green eyes scan the room as he rested his weight against the wall. "This place looks great! I think it was definitely worth it."
The others agreed reluctantly.
"Plus, you gotta admit, she's pretty cute," he said, drawing his eyebrows together and shrugging.
Unfortunately, that was when Nagisa finally walked in.
"I'm flattered, Kurra," Nagisa said with polite disinterest. "But you do know I actually am a guy, right?"
"You're kidding!" Hinata's eyes widened in astonishment.
"Sorry, but I'm really not," Nagisa insisted apologetically.
Kurra blushed darkly as the embarrassment creeped up into his throat. Being attracted to his teacher was one thing, but that teacher being a guy without him even realizing made his confession something entirely else.
Both Hinata and Ippantekina laughed at him, and a few others who had heard their conversation smirked or snorted as well.
Nagisa simply sighed and gently shook his head.
"Leave him alone," he chided. "It happens all the time. He didn't know. And sit on your chair, please, Hinata, not your desk."
They all did as Nagisa said.
"Sorry for my tardiness, I got held up at the train station."
He did not think it necessary to mention to his students that it had been a literal hold-up, by a mugger with particularly unfortunate judgment, whom Nagisa had promptly incapacitated and called an ambulance for.
"Alright class, I trust you all brought your history textbooks," Nagisa said naïvely, once everyone was settled. "Please take them out and open them to page 34. That is, if you don't mind skipping the introduction."
He pulled out his own copy of the book, and waited for his students to follow. Glancing around the room, he saw six copies. As he'd had to do so often since he started this job, Nagisa resisted the urge to sigh heavily.
"I'll make do I suppose." He picked up a piece of chalk, and began to write on the board in smooth lines and neat characters. "This semester's focus is on Japanese history. Those of you who learn best through reading, I encourage you to follow along with the textbook, as for the rest of you, please pay attention to the lecture.
"I'll work on ways to accommodate each of your learning styles as I get to know you better, but this'll have to do for now, I'm afraid. Now, can anyone tell me how people first came to Japan?"
No one volunteered an answer.
"I'm sure at least one of you knows this!"
A hesitant hand went up in the back.
"Yes!"
"Er . . ." began the student nervously, fiddling with her yellow-painted fingernails, eyes zoning in and out behind her large blue-framed glasses. "Wasn't there a bridge between here and Korea?"
"Exactly!" Nagisa congratulated. "Satori, right? We came over from what is now Korea, on a land bridge. Fast forward a handful of centuries and..." Nagisa continued to give them an overview of Japan. He spoke animatedly, and talked about the events as if he had been there himself.
Students who could never make themselves follow the voice of a droning teacher, found that they were actually engaged in the lesson.
When he got to the part about the establishment of samurai, and fighting the Mongols, he had a real katana.
The sword looked familiar to Kirasaya, and it was only a moment before she realized that it was hers. She had decided to start bringing it to school every day, in case she could use it to 'kill' Nagisa-sensei, even though she hadn't been allowed to remain in kendo club since her grades started dropping. Somehow, without her noticing, he had taken the sword from its place at the side of her desk.
"Now, this is Kirasaya's, and it's probably not from hundreds of years ago, but it's the same type of sword that samurai used," Nagisa-sensei said, carefully unsheathing the blade. "In ancient times, they were forged using a method called 'folding the iron', because a chunk of iron big enough for a whole sword was hard to get. To do this, sword-smiths collected many smaller pieces of iron ore, and hammered and melted them together.
"It worked, but sometimes it left tiny bubbles of air in the iron, and it made the metal impure and brittle, so if you used the sword the wrong way it broke pretty easily.
"I actually don't know how to use a sword like this." He returned it to its sheath and put it back by Kirasaya's desk. "It was a good idea to bring a weapon to kill me that I'm not familiar with the wielding of, Kirasaya. Way to take the initiative," he praised, smiling.
During those first few weeks of lessons with him, though the students were frustrated that none of their assassination attempts had worked so far, they were finding that Nagisa-sensei was pretty much the greatest teacher any of them had ever had. He actually seemed to care about them. He wanted them to learn, rather than just do the work and pass the tests. He even took the time to find out the best methods for teaching each of them individually.
He was still just a teacher-in-training, a little rough around the edges, unused to the expectation of acting like an authority figure, and it was still a lot of trial-and-error for him, but he tried so hard, and kept trying no matter his errors, and it was working. He was polishing his teaching skills to a shine.
Despite these virtues, the students remained reluctant to accept him. Several were confused by, or uncomfortable with, the idea that they might actually not hate a teacher, or school in general.
All their past years of schooling, the thing they'd learned best was that teachers only supported students as long as those students reflected well on them, and they generally could not be trusted. These teenagers knew school as a place that molded students into cookie-cutter citizens who conformed to the norm and worked like one of a thousand identical cogs, satisfied with mediocrity.
Kirasaya in particular was extremely suspicious of Nagisa-sensei. To be fair, she was generally a suspicious and curious person when it came to everyone. But she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something off about him in particular, something dangerous. And though she didn't know it, she wasn't alone in thinking so.
The more she thought about it, however, the more determined she was to figure it out.
[I got most of my info from the video at the top. Except the stuff on swords, b/c I just know useless stuff like that. I highly recommend you watch the video, it's hilarious, and informative, and you won't regret it. Love y'all.
<3 Raaor!]
YOU ARE READING
Some Teacher
Fanfiction"Nagisa-sensei, why did you decide to be a teacher?" Kirasaya asked. "It was in middle school," Nagisa said fondly, "I had an amazing teacher, and he inspired me to become one myself. He helped me realize that I wanted to mould young minds." "Was...
