Kids, Masks, and Staying Safe as a Teacher

    What is it with kids not wearing masks?

    I don't know how it is in other prefectures, but in my town there appears to be a common trend with kids of a variety of ages just not wearing masks in public at all.
It's probably only around thirty percent of the kids I see walking, but that's enough to worry me. Even as cases of CoVid are higher than they have ever been in the prefecture and the mayor has kicked the danger level up a notch to level three (though I have no idea what that entails), more and more kids seem to be going maskless. 

    Sometimes these kids are with adults and most of those adults seem to be wearing masks, as if to say, "Yes, I value my own life, but my 5 year old? He'll obviously survive it. Kids can't even get it, you know." 
    And if that's what they are thinking, they are dreadfully wrong. We still don't even know how badly the long lasting effects of this virus are. People are still having symptoms months after the infection seems to clear. No one knows how badly this will damage the children who get it, even if they aren't as likely to die soon after exposure. It's also not as if the children's death rate is zero. Maybe these people have more faith in their own good luck than I do. 


I couldn't find a good illustration so I tried to make one.

    In any case, the small conversational school I work for has a strict mask-only policy. The children and teachers will be masked. Everyone will wash their hands and not fiddle with their masks. Hand sanitizer will be sprayed on the hands of those who choose to touch their masks during class as well as over all student-related surfaces between classes, but maskless kids will not be admitted. 

    Enter Jerk Kid. This kid regularly uses obstinance as a bargaining tool with his mom in a counter-productive way. A few weeks ago he spent half of the class screaming like he was being murdered while standing at the door to the school because his mom, who was waiting in the car and just watching this, wanted him to come in and go to class and he had decided otherwise. On his good days, he will participate in about half of the class, but since the masks came into play, he has chosen that as his own private battle.  

    If he's wearing a mask when he enters, he will pull it down when he washes his hands and then touch it again when he's done to pull it up and effectively re-dirty his hands. Most of the time his mom has to beg him to put on the mask which he spends half the class touching, rubbing, or pulling down while teachers either ignore him completely or stop ever three minutes to tell him again what the rules are. 

    This month, I came to his class to see him in place with his mask under his nose. I drew a face on the board in black marker and then circled the nose and mouth in red, explaining in Japanese that these were dangerous, both for giving and receiving germs. I drew a mask over the mouth.    

     "Is this good?" I asked.
     His classmate said "No."
     I agreed and drew the rest of the mask over the nose of the face. "Now?"
    "Yes," she said.

    Jerk kid flipped the mask back up over his nose by thumping it upward from the bottom. He still spent the rest of the lesson working it down before being asked to put it back. This was literally the only thing he did in class with me other than the one time he rubbed his whole mouth area with his hand and wiped it all over the desk I later drenched in disinfectant.

    Does anyone have any really good answers to this other than waiting for the kid to catch on, get sick, or quit?