Back to School

School has started again, and that means it's sports festival time~! The sports festival is an annual event, like field day or color wars, but WAY more ritualized, because, after all, this is Japan. The actual thing isn't until the 13th, but the week and a half before are dedicated to practicing everything from marching, to singing the school song, to dancing, to more marching, to group calisthenics. There is not much going on in the way of classes, which means a continued light load for me. I'm spending the time working on my English boards and re-vamping my Miriam Dollar system. In light of the recent crime wave (ie kids stealing Miriam Dollars from one another, and in on instance, a second year setting up an extortion racket), I decided to change the rules. Now the students have to write their names on the Miriam Dollars (or I have to do it for them) so no one else can use them. The tricky bit is while I know many of the kids names, I have trouble recalling them from nowhere. If I see a kid's name written, I can usually find the face, but going from face to name is much harder. So we'll see how this works.