Short story: I didn't apologize

I teach at the Nova in Anjo on Saturdays and I have for what feels like FOREVER. I hate going there. The same people always come on Saturdays so I never see any new faces there. The type of student that Anjo seems to attract (with a few notable exceptions) are smug businessmen and engineers who don't like to be silly or creative and don't like to actually speak English. They like to just nod and act like this is all so damned easy that its almost funny.

So, I was given a group of junior students (7 and 8 year-olds) because there's one girl in the class who is a handful and the staff thinks she might listen to a male teacher. I go down to the lobby to get the kids (there are three girls and a boy) and one of the girls calls me a monkey right off the bat. That's fine. I get called lots of stuff by kids and I know how to handle it. 'I'm not a monkey, YOU'RE THE MONKEY!' She then calls me monkey teacher and I call her monkey student and everyone's laughing so its fun. I do the lesson and everyone waves goodbye and I feel like I did a bang-up job. Less than 15 minutes goes by and one of the Japanese staff comes up to the teacher's room to talk to me. 'We just got a call from one of the girl's parents. Did you call her monkey in the class?' 'Hells motherfucking yeah I called her a monkey. She IS a monkey.' 'Ok, that girl's mom is really upset. She wants you to apologize to the girl.' The staff tells me that the little girl's mom understands what happened and that it was all a game or whatever, but she doesn't care because I'm an adult and I should know better. Calling me a monkey can be forgiven because she's only a kid but I'm at fault because I'm a mature and responsible grown-up. I refuse to apologize. Being the mature grownup, I tell the Japanese staff that I'll quit before I apologize to the kid. It's not that I think I'm too good to apologize to a little girl, but I don't feel like I did anything wrong. I call students names all the time, and some of those names stick for weeks. Hello Eri, hello Shouta, hello Yuuki, hello Poop. Its just how it works.

So a week went by and I had to go back to Anjo. I figured that after what I said the staff would just switch the class to someone else and the mom would get over it. Well, the mom got over it and no longer wanted an apology but the staff wasn't bright enough to switch me out of the class. After all the fuss that girl's mom made (including phone calls to the other parents to see if their kids liked me as a teacher or not) the kids just couldn't be comfortable around me. They were all quiet and wouldn't really look at me. I tried my best to get it back to how it was but that trust (or whatever) was completely fucked. It was terrible. I felt guilty and so did they. Ugh. If that mom hadn't freaked out no one would have cared and everything would have been fine.

The other teachers and I came up with some theories on why the mom got so heated. One is that in Japan there have been some recent high-profile cases where teachers bully students and the kids go off and kill themselves over it. Maybe the mom just freaked out because her head was elsewhere when her daugher told her what happened. Another one, that Alex (from New Zealand) came up with, is that the word monkey has special significance in Japan. I guess thats what occupying forces called the Japanese and its a racial slur on par with the N-word in the US. The only other thing that we came up with was that she didn't really understand what happened in the classroom because if she had, she wouldn't have freaked out.

Anyway, its all over and nothing has changed except now those kids and I can't have fun anymore.