Midterms, Sports Day, and Halloween! November 11th, 2022

Hi everyone! Here’s an update from the month of October. With school in-session, the first (of many many sets of exams) for students has begun. The class schedule below details how each student takes 8-9 exams over a four-day period (including the notorious English course) and shows how diverse the classes can be—featuring classes like mind and body understanding (こころとからだの理解); fishing (漁業); financial accounting (財務会計); political economics (政治経済); and life support technology (生活支援技術). If your Japanese is proficient enough, feel free to comb through the classes below. Otherwise, Google Translate's camera feature works well too (it has saved me many times in Japan).

One Midterm Master Schedule

My midterm exams, one may say, was a picture collage fest. Testing students’ abilities to identify and describe animals; using Mario characters for adjective sentence making; and connecting job occupation words with the correct verb tenses were interesting tests to create. It was certainly a new experience (making tests versus taking tests), but I enjoyed it for the most part! I hope in the near future I’m able to ask the students more free-response questions rather than multiple-choice questions (applying what they learn instead of rote memorization).

Midterm #1

Midterm #2

Midterm #3

Transitioning away from exams, the students had a well-deserved breather by prepping and participating in Sports Day! Sports Day is similar to Field Day back in the United States, except each school in Japan (yes, elementary, junior high, and senior high school) has one designated day to host their own “mini Olympics”. Each school, however, makes it their own and all students participate in the festivities in some manner. For Noto high school, some of the premiering games were “Multi Tug-O-War” (similar to Capture the Flag(s) except ropes are captured instead of flags); “Bean Bag BASKETball” (students try to throw as many bean bags as possible in a ～4m (～13ft) tall basket against the opposing team); and the all-time classic relay race. Just a side note that there was a teacher’s team, and the only regrets we had was how sore we were the next day. It was good fun! Also, the names of the games are my own and are not direct English-to-Japanese translations. If you feel obligated to share or have names that are more creative, please comment down below!

On a different note, and to address some questions I’ve gotten from fellow blog readers, I am unable to publicize images of students because of privacy laws within Japan. I will, however, try my best to illustrate these experiences through my writing and non-student pictures. Here are some example photos of Noto's Sports Day:

"Bean Bag BASKETball" (this is the best picture I could create). Teams compete to throw as many beanbags in their baskets. If anyone knows the actual name of this game, please comment down below!

"Multi-Tug-O-War" (Multi-綱引き). Imagine this, but multiply the ropes by 10 and the students are at opposite ends to race for each rope. The team that claims the most ropes at the end of time, wins!

We can’t end the October entry without mentioning Halloween, however, and this will be the final topic! During school, I taught a Halloween lesson detailing some trademark candy in the U.S. (Twix, Skittles, Reese’s, etc.); a brief history of Halloween (Samhain); and modern ventures in haunted houses, mazes, and showing decorations like human-sized skeleton/witch/spider props (shout-out to my predecessor for outlining this). I did manage to wake up a few students with one of the decorations—a ghost hologram GIPH popping out of the screen. Outside of school, watching movies like “Don’t Breathe” and “It” certainly gave way to some good scares and fun with the Noto crew. (I would 10/10 recommend/not recommend “It” for people who are scared of clowns.) And finally, before the month was done, I volunteered to host Halloween games for families in Noto with Mal and Aimee! The kids that came were very adventurous to venture through an obstacle course, the ‘mystery boxes’ (touching ‘brains’ when its actually wet spaghetti, for example), and a personally designed maze. It was a joy to see the kids having fun and to be able to work with the staff at the center—it was a real treat!

Ghost GIPH used during the Halloween presentation. Look it up (at your own peril!).

An obstacle course featuring "spin three times using a pole"; "hoop jumping"; moving beads from plate to plate using chopsticks; and "fan the spider" across the finish line!

An example picture of Mal's mystery boxes that the students could put their hands in. One of the boxes was said to have brains inside (but it was actually cold spaghetti with a little bit of olive oil)!

Aimee's hand-designed maze come to life! The maze path let the parents have a good photo opportunity for the kids coming out of the monster tubes!

"A witch, an alien, and a vampire volunteer at a school..."

Here’s to the end of an eventful spooky season and onto November!

Thanks for tuning in,

Alex