Athletic's Day a.k.a. Mass Chaos

Fraser High holds a day known as Athletics Day. The students are split up into groups according to their group room (home room) and then groups of group rooms are assigned a team name and color. On Athletics Day, the students get to come to school and spend the entire day in groups traveling from station to station. Each team gets a point for each person that makes an attempt at each event and each individual gets points for trying and winning at each event.

The events are made up of track events: shot put, discus, javelin, high jump, long jump, 200m, 400m, 100m, three-legged race, and the gum boot (goulashes, wellingtons, whatever.) toss. The students pick and choose which events they want to do and which events they want to take seriously. Other schools actually have a track team but since nobody is really interested in track at Fraser High, they take the ones that score the highest and then have them compete at the regional tournament and then on to the national tournament. I was very interested to see how this day would go. There are two thousand students that attend the school and I don't think a single student has even heard the word "respect" let alone what it means.

Ideally, everyone dresses down in activity clothes (they normally wear uniforms) but a day without required uniforms is simply a day to show off the cutest clothes and the most skin. I cannot believe how much cleavage, bras, and legs I saw today! Even as a day without uniforms, no school I ever went to would allow this much skin to be shown. Two girls showed up in tight spaghetti strap dresses. One was wearing a black sparkly bar and the other a rainbow bra. I know because when they turned around you could see it. Some girls wear shirts that have such a low V-neck you can actually see where the two bra cups join together. ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS! I will admit, however, that some of the students really impressed me by decking out in honor of their team color. There was lots of body paint, wigs, etc. in honor of each individuals' team color.

Surprisingly enough, the majority of the students were good enough to stay with their group rooms and participate in the events. The team I followed around actually took second today. It was crazy to me to see so many kids all over the field. Those who weren't participating were play fighting, texting, listening to iPods, playing with a soccer ball, having water fights, etc. After talking to one of the teachers, I found out this day is simply a day for the seniors (which aren't just those graduating but anyone over Year 10, which is ages 15-18) to have fun and make memories.

Although this event was fairly organized, I felt like compared to things held back home it was simply mass chaos. It provides a great opportunity to build a rapport with the students and spend time building relationships, but since I don't know who my students are going to be it was mostly a sit-around-and-occasionally-talk-to-other-teachers-day.

I like the concept of Athletics Day but I think I would do some tweaking. We'll see if I ever decide to present a mass chaos day at a future job...