Dance, Walk Rally and Campfire

Today was the meat of the whole trip. It took up the most time and had the most activities to cover. And the day started really early. We needed to get ready and be out around 5am to watch over the students who were going to practice their sports. So me and the other male teachers got up early to go to the soccer field where the tennis courts are close to and watched some the tennis girls play as well as some of the other students playing their respective sports. Soon after that was breakfast. It started at 7am so all the students needed to be out there and ready to eat before the days’ events.

After breakfast, all the students needed to go back to the soccer field because we would have to get ready for the school festival and they needed to practice their dance. It was very interesting to see how they teach the students the moves and how they prepare for the school festival. They learned it by sections, and they teach all the students at the same time. I couldn’t even imagine how to teach 144 students the dance all the same time. It’s hard enough to teach 30 students at one time. Before we concluded that, we played some games on the soccer field. It was just a bunch of contest games against other students in the other classes. The weather was beautiful as they usually are after a typhoon. The skies cleared up enough to get a great view of Mt. Fuji. It didn’t last very long because of clouds, but I did get to see it. They did a bunch of track styled games and I also think it was a precursor to the Sports Festival coming up next month. After that, the morning activities were concluded. I did get some great pictures of the students and Mt. Fuji in the background. It was awesome to see that.

We then had lunch since everyone worked up a sweat from all the running around and all the dancing. Lunch was very quick with ramen being the meal of choice. The teachers needed to leave early because we were doing a walk rally, which is a scavenger hunt, where the students have to walk around the compound and to located landmarks and other things and find their way to and from a location collecting clues along the way. I was partnered up with a P.E. teacher and we had a location next to a community center. We sat there for about 2 hours and I tried to talk to her with my broken Japanese. She doesn’t speak English at all, but I talked to the students as they came by. We were somewhere in the middle of the course. After all the students passed by, I took the opportunity to go through the rest of the course and follow all the points on the map and figure it out. I think that my course was pretty easy since I finished the whole course in about 45 minutes, while some students took about 4 hours to finish. They got lost of course and I’m sure they had a hard course too. That was the main attraction for the afternoon.

The next thing was to get ready for the evening activity. We were going to do a great big campfire some where on the grounds. So the male teachers needed to get that ready. It was a lot of moving of the sticks and ply wood needed for the fire. One of the teachers had been a Boy Scout when he was younger so he knew how to construct it so that it would last longer and be a pretty great big fire. Somewhere in between set up and the beginning of the campfire was dinner. After dinner finished, the campfire committee got together to get some of the entertainment ready.

The campfire was great. I really enjoyed it. It had singing by all the teachers and performances by students in every 11th grade class. You could really see the closeness of the all the students. Some more students professed their love for me tonight too, which freaked me out for a bit since it was in front of the headmaster. But I’m sure he didn’t think much of it. I’m a very popular teacher with these students and I think he knows that. I had VIP seating as I was sitting next to the headmaster the whole time and it was only us two on the tarp, everyone else had to sit around the stadium seating on the concrete. It was a good way to end the trip. Students had a lot of glow sticks and were singing and dancing. I’m not sure what the purpose of the trip was, but I think it was accomplished. Today, we took care of the physical work out, and yesterday we focused on the mental aspects.