Speech Contest

School this week was a bit slow because of mid-terms, but I still had a great week! I had my second 女子会 (jyoshikai) outing with my female co-workers from Shinozaki. We went to a great restaurant close to Kokura station. I'm very close with one of the English teachers, but it was nice to talk to my other co-workers. There are many new teachers in Shinozaki this year that are really nice and it's been great getting to know them a bit better! One teacher is even trying to learn English in her free time by listening to English lessons on her iPod. I invited her and some of the other teacher to my place for dinner sometime when we are all free. Obviously we will speak mostly in Japanese, but we can speak some English for her and other teachers who are interested in practicing English! The teachers taught me some Japanese tongue twisters and we all had fun trying to say them. I taught them one easy one in English, but it was hard to say quickly. We also played with our phones. The teacher I was sitting next to was demonstrating Siri on her new iPhone 6. We would both ask Siri a question, her in Japanese and me in Enlgish, and compare the answers we got. It was a lot of fun! After the 女子会 I went to visit Kikumi before going home. I've been really busy at school and I hadn't gotten a chance to talk with her in while, so it was nice to see her! We sang a bit of karaoke before I had to head home.

For the last month I've been staying after school every day to help my students prepare for the English speech contest. I had seven students participating between my two school. The students worked incredibly hard and the contest was Saturday. All the JET ALTs were judges, but we were split up in a way that makes sure we are not judging our own students. The contest is divided into three categorizes: skit, original speech, and recitation. There are three speeches the students can choose for the recitation section. This year I was judging the original speech section, which was much better than the recitation section I judged last year. It can get very boring listening to the same speech over and over! All the speeches I heard were really interesting and although none of my students were in them, I still had two students in my group who I was close with during English camp this summer. Neither of them won, unfortunately, but both of their speeches were great!

During the closing ceremony of speech contest the winners were announced. None of my students won a prize, but when I saw them after the announcements they were all proud of themselves for participating. I couldn't watch them compete because I was judging in a separate room, but the teachers took videos that I watched later and I think they all did really well. I had cute notebooks and pens that I gave to all my students as a thank you for working so hard with me over the last month.

Since the JETs were all together at speech contest, we decided to meet up again after going home and changing out of our suits. I went out with Patrick, Chris, Leah, Rebecca, and Juha to do the monothon. The monothon is a tradition among the Kitakyushu JETs where you walk the length of the monorail, about five and a half miles. We meet at 企救丘 (Kikugaoka), the station farthest out, and walked under the monorail back to Kokura station. We made a lot of stops at various places, which made the walk take almost three hours. It was a ton of fun even if my legs were sore the next day!

This week I am crazy busy! Tomorrow (10/7) is Patrick's birthday and I will be making dinner. Wednesday is both a rehearsal for my singing gig on Friday and a welcome party for the new JETs with the members of the Kitakyushu Board of Education. Thursday I'm going to karaoke with my friend Caol and Friday is my performance at Swing21! Saturday I leave in the morning with Leah to spend my long weekend in Kobe. Because of the long weekend I will most likely be a day or two late in updating this blog, but it should be a pretty action packed post so stay tuned!