The Long-Overdue Sports Day Post

As this is the first sort of free weekend I've had since Term 3 started on April 12, I'll take the opportunity to recap some of the major events that have occurred since my last post at the end of March:

• The last day of Term 2, April 1, was IIS Sports Day - which will be the main topic of this post.
• From April 2-April 11, I traveled from Iringa to China and back to visit my old students at OYY - which will be the main subject of the next post.
• On April 17, the first Saturday of the new term, Primary Student Council (of which I am the teacher sponsor) hosted an activity day that they for some reason decided to call Game Planet. It made for humorous posters, at least. I'll put up a few pictures from that day as well.
• The next weekend was a long weekend - we had Monday, April 26 off because it was Union Day, the day that Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to become Tanzania. So I traveled to Dodoma (7-8 hours away by bus) that weekend to visit Aron, my friend in the Peace Corps.
• And just 2 days ago, on Friday April 30, IIS had its first-ever Dance-Off, a combined disco/competition between parents, teachers, and students. It's notable if only for the facts that I was on the teacher dance crew (and in fact co-choreographed our team routine) and our crew name was the Professors of Groove. Don't worry, this will most certainly be its own post as well.

For now, let's talk about Sports Day. As the Senior PE teacher and obvious sports lover on staff, I was in charge of this event. The P5 teacher, Hugh, was in charge last year and helped me figure out how to change things from last year and what to keep. We spent most of March planning the various activities, getting materials, etc. The event itself was from 3-6 PM.

The entire student body, from Preschool up to A-level students, is divided into mixed-grade teams. Last year there were 6 teams, this year we bumped it up to 8. Setting the teams is a huge pain, because you have to make sure there's an equitable distribution of students from each grade level and from Secondary and Primary, that there's gender and athletic ability balance, and you have to deal with the students who come up to you every day before the event and tell you that they thought they were coming, but they're actually not and so I need to take them off the roster and reformulate the teams. I have to say, though, I did a pretty fair job.

Each team has a teacher leader and a color, and they chose their team names and made cheers and chants. We made chalk lines on the pitch to give each team a lane.

At the start of the afternoon, teams ran from one end of the school to their lane on the pitch. I had had an inspired idea the day before to give each team a theme song, and play it as they ran out. It was hilarious - some teams picked songs, and I picked for others. The songs were "Danger Zone," "Gettin' Jiggy With It," "Hey Ya," "Welcome to the Jungle," "The Final Countdown," "We Will Rock You," "Remember the Name," and, of course, "Eye of the Tiger." Here's the Red Team, a.k.a. the Terrifying Tomatoes, running out to "Hey Ya":

Their motto, invented by their very astute preschool team member, was "You can't catch up!" Ha...ha...get it?

Here are all the teams, lined up before the first race:

We held 8 races, with an intermission after the 4th race. The first race was the Potato Relay, in which potatoes were laid out at various locations in the team's lanes. The Preschoolers' potatoes were about 5 meters in front of them, the Lower Primary students' were slightly further, and so on until the Senior students, who had to run all the way across the pitch. One at a time, students had to run, grab a potato, and take it back to the starting line.

The second race was the Potato-on-Spoon relay. It's the same concept as the egg-on-a-spoon race, and we used the same line delineations for various grade levels that we did for the previous race.

The third race was pretty hilarious: it was the Giant Clothing race, for Primary students only. Each team was given an enormous T-shirt and a big hat, and one a a time students had to put on the big clothes, run to their team teacher (about 10 m away), then run back to the starting line and take off the clothes so the next kid could repeat the process. If you've never seen preschoolers run in XL shirts, with really intense expressions on their faces, you haven't laughed.

The fourth contest was an Egg Toss, for Senior students only.

At intermission, we had a Boat Race. Hugh and I somehow had this idea at the exact same time as we were brainstorming one day - he said he used to play it with his rugby team, and it was the drinking game of choice of the Stanford Crew team so I saw it done a fair number of times (if you know me at all, you know I dislike alcohol - my teammates let me drink water or soda). Anyway, in a Boat Race members of 2 teams line up opposite each other, each holding a drink. The person on the end of the line for each team starts drinking when the ref says go. When he/she finishes, he/she puts the empty cup or bottle on his/her head and that's the signal for the next person to start chugging. The first team to finish all drinks wins.

For this event, we used small (250 ml) bottles of water and pitted 8 members of each team against each other. It was awesome.

After intermission, the next event was the Obstacle Course, my personal brainchild that turned out to be too complicated for the kids. I had planned out all the various responsibilities for kids on the teams, we had practiced them, but still some of the kids made mistakes. All the teams finished it and we got times for all of them (we ran it as time trials, not all 8 teams at once), but it was pretty frustrating to watch what I was telling kids go in one ear and out the other.

Sixth up was the Pop-the-Balloon-on-the-Chair relay, in which each student is given an inflated balloon. One a time, students run up to a chair about 10 m away and have to pop the balloon by sitting on it. I liked this one because all the balloons popping made everyone wake up.

The penultimate race was the Water Bottle Filling relay, in which each team had 2 1.5L water bottles with small openings to fill. At the starting line, teams had a small cup and a bucket of water. Students had to fill the cup, run to the empty bottles (again, 10 m away) and pour the water from the cup to the bottle. First team to fill both bottles won.

The final race was a team-building exercise called "Crossing the Bridge": teams are told to get from Point A to Point B on the pitch, stepping only on pieces of cardboard they're given. They get about half as many pieces of cardboard as there are kids on the team (12 kids, 6 pieces). So big kids carry little kids, etc. It's cute.

At the end of the day, my flatmate Adam's team was victorious and everyone seemed to have an enjoyable time. We even had to have a sprint-off for 3rd place, because there was a tie. The parents got a real kick out of it too. I, who had spent the event running around getting various materials to locations; making decisions on possible rule violations; supervising and timing events; and doing other things at a frenetic pace, was pretty happy it was over. It was fun, though.