Hello friends!!!

Sorry for no entry & resolutions yesterday… there is also no TiLT this week because tomorrow, I am going to my second school for the first time!! (EEEeeee!! Eeee!!!) I was supposed to go yesterday, but I didn’t….

because…

yesterday was sports day!!!

Yay! Sports day, sports day! Sports Festival is the proper name, but what it should REALLY be called is Sports Spirit Hooray Hooray Festival.

Honestly… you can file yesterday under “I’ve never seen anything quite like this”. There were the things you would expect: students running races, teachers herding them here and there with whistles and megaphones.

What struck me was the intense spirit of each homeroom team. These kids get behind whatever they do and quite literally give it their all. They make banners and team shirts, they wear colored headbands and swarm their teammates when they cross the finish lines. I saw kids eat the pavement going over a hurdle and then getting up and sprinting on like no tomorrow. I saw every class in the school dance dances that they had created themselves, with no-one slacking or being too cool to participate. I saw kids openly weeping with the bitterness of defeat.

So far, this was the time where I felt the most involved and included with both the teachers and the students. I know that’s a precious feeling, because as a foreigner I will always be “outside” the group. On sports day, kids were chatting with me, cheering and yelling and mugging for photos with none of the shyness and quiet English that you hear in the classroom. I met and talked with some of the teachers that I had only seen once or twice before, saw them interact with students with a friendly air.

This coming weekend is the school cultural festival. Maybe there will be that same air, maybe not. But any chance to interact outside of the relatively rigid school setting is a chance that I will take. We all sweated and yelled and got sunburned together. We were all people together, is a way you could put it.

When I biked home, and out again to purchase groceries, I saw my kids all over the city, still wearing their colored headbands. They yell at me when they see me outside of school now, which is great.

And with all of that, I am also getting more concrete work to do in school! For example, having a teacher say “here is a general plan of what we want to cover for the rest of the semester” is the greatest thing in the world. Hearing “do whatever you want” is like a death knell… too many options is one of the most limiting things I can think of, outside of having zero options.