Every lesson I have a group of students who are bandaged, bruised, or encased in plaster. I have always wondered if students are just incredibly daring, brittle, or uncoordinated. Judging from what I saw today at the English camp sports' day, daring applies to very few students. For children who begin learning taekwondo as soon as they can stand, these children have the slowest reflexes and the most uncoordinated bodies ever.
Now, I admit that I throw like a girl (I am not talking about softball pitchers). I hate running, my right leg comes up when I shoot a basket, and I am not about to get close to a sweaty armpit to intercept a ball. Also, my depth perception tends to be quite off and my reflexes tend to be a bit slow of late. So keep in mind, that this story is coming from me.
Today was rainy, so we had to stay indoors in the ancient gym on the 4th floor. This gym is long and narrow with splintering wood floors that give way too much for comfort. There is a stage at one end, with a projector and a sound system, student artwork attached to tacked up metal cages lines the walls on either side, ceiling fans hang down way too low, and hundreds of chairs are shoved to the back wall. I was very shocked to find out that this gym is still used as a gym.
The first event was dodge ball. We used one soft ball. In the Korean version, as far as I can gather, the ball is thrown up by the referee and it volleyed by the team captions to their team. You are safe if you catch the ball or the ball bounces before hitting you. If you get hit (before the ball bounces) or drop the ball, you are out. If you are out you go behind the opposing team and if the ball crosses the line, you can throw the ball and try to get the opposing team members out.
So, Matt and I painfully watched as fifteen screeching, cowering students rushed from one end of the gym to the other in one large huddle trying to escape the one ball. Once in a while a student was brave enough to try to catch the ball, but did not often succeed. Many times they dropped it and then proceed to fall over it. If they managed to catch it, the students either hit their own teammate in the head or hit the wall (knocking off the racks holding the artwork). And none of the students seemed to realize that they needed to take the good throwers out first.
I don't know how many times, the children were saved from outs because they tried to dodge, tripped and some how the ball managed to brush between their legs instead. And just like in a cartoon, the student put their heads between their legs to make sure the ball really did pass through. This made their butts perfect targets for the good players. It would have been funny, if it hadn't been so painful to watch.
The next event was team jump rope. Since one boy got injured by the soft dodge ball and was laid up with a heat patch on his bicep, I stepped in. I haven't done team jump rope since I was 10. But, it was like riding a bike and I did quite well. So well in fact, that my shoes came off and I landed on the floor barefoot, receiving a pretty gnarly hunk of wood through my foot, thus ending my short-lived jumping career.
I have never seen a group of elementary students so bad at jump rope, they cannot turn the rope or jump. I don't know how many students were strangled. A rope ended up wrapped in the ceiling fan (with the student frantically turning in circles trying to untangle the fan, only managing to make himself dizzy and the rope even more tangled). Needless to say, Double Dutch was out of the question.
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