September, Pt. 1
Hey everyone, how was your September? Because it’s been so long since I’ve updated this, and I’m kind of tired after finishing up something for a class tomorrow only to find out I left my flash drive at the wrong school today, I’m going to break this into two parts. I’ll start things off with some videos and photos of my sumo matches and the aftermath.
You can tell I’m really trying for the grab and lift in this one, haha.
This guy was the closest to me in size and it was definitely a tough battle! When I threw him onto the compacted sand at the end and then landed on top of him I knew it had to suck so I wanted to make sure he was OK. I know I was hurting!
After eight or nine matches I was definitely ready for some food. And a shower…
With that out of the way, September was pretty wonderful. Most of the school days have been taken up by self-introduction lessons, which turned out to almost perfectly fit the allotted time per class period and ended up being pretty fun for the kids. So, I am quite satisfied that the introduction I spent a lot of two weeks creating went so well. At least for the most part… At the beginning of the introduction I would ask the students where they thought I was from and give them the choices of America, England, or Australia and they would raise their hands for which answer they thought was correct. English accents aren’t easily differentiated by the untrained Japanese ear so this was a completely random guess, but at every grade level and in almost every class for some reason more than half of them thought I was Australian. I guess this is karma for years of mocking the Australian accent. Just call me Crocodile Dundee.
Also, I mentioned in my presentation that I like playing video games, which went over well with all the kids who’ve spent the last couple years in and out of online classes and use chrome-books for nearly every lesson. Go figure. I was talking to some of the middle school boys about a particular game I play that’s very popular here and we got onto the topic of its competitive ranking system. I told them that at one point I was in a rank a bit above average and they acted so shocked that I thought they were giving me the classic sarcastic middle school boy bit, but given that it’s been a month and I’m still having kids come up to me and say, “Hello, Angelo . . . Apex Legends, yeah?” with genuine looking excitement on their faces I assume they think I’m some god gamer. This is hilariously unfounded but I won’t be the one to tell them. Unless they find out the password to this blog, I guess.
Stay tuned for next time when I’ll talk about school life, more festivals, and other miscellaneous happenings.