Track and Field Day

Besides my Western Society classes I also had two regular oral English classes. One of these classes I'd also had in my first semester at the school, it wasn't originally going to be that way but I traded one class with Peter to make my schedule work better. But since I'd already had this class once they were a little harder to handle and I had to have some new stuff to do with them. Most of the new stuff wasn't a problem as I had done really different stuff in my second semester than in my first, but some times I'd find myself running short on ideas. That's why on one particularly nice early fall day I decided to have sort of a track and field day. I wanted to do something outside the classroom and try to introduce the students to some more American games. There were a few games we tried to play but a number of them were a little to hard to explain. Kickball it would seem is pretty damn hard to explain to people who don't know anything about baseball. We did play some capture the flag which also proved harder to explain then I was hoping for. I was trying to play a freeze tag version but it just ended up with people pulling at the flag and sort of making a scrum. I got the flags from some the school had put out when the new students showed up that, how should I say it, I reappropriated for my class. I also played some 500 with them which was sort of a problem since the girls, 90% of the class, don't really like actually catching the ball.

I finally had more luck with some outdoors games that the students actually knew. I can't remember what the Chinese name for it is but all the students know Duck, Duck, Goose. We had a lot of people so it was a bunch of fun to play in a big circle. Even as slow as I am I was able to outrun some of the girls as long as I picked one who had ignored my advice to wear sneakers. Finally I asked them about some Chinese outdoor games. The girls knew of this game, video below that was called something like chicken. Basically all the kids but one formed a big line and the one who was not in the line had to try to get around and tag the person in the very back of the line. So the person in the front, and those in the middle, would try and move in such a way that they would block this person from getting around to the back. In reality though it usually just meant that as soon as the person got around the line all the girls would break apart and the whole thing would have to start over. I'm not sure if I would do it again since the whole class was a little light on the educational content, but it was fun to try out something new.