One of my weaknesses as a teacher is that I’m always happy to have days off and I’m always happy to have my students do well in sports if it means I don’t have to see them for an hour or two.

A couple times of year at the school where I work junior high school classes are interrupted by various sports tournaments. Non-athlete students still have class, but because the majority of students are absent, special classes are held in place of regular classes. I suspect this is because Japanese law makes class attendance both compulsory and a right. Students have a legal right to attend the class they must legally attend (something like that). If the majority of students are gone, that means regular classes can’t be held because 1) that would be depriving the athletes of the their legal right to an education and 2) most of the teachers are off serving as team faculty advisers and coaches anyway.

Whatever the reason, all I know is I don’t have to see my worst class tomorrow. Because there is a special schedule, our junior high first and second year classes (7th and 8th grade) are cancelled completely. This is true even if it rains as enough sports take place in-doors, or can be played in the rain, to preclude classes taking place.

The only thing that can hurt this is the teams sucking. This happened several years ago. Many of us had already planned our free time (if you have mostly junior high classes it is possible to get an entire day off) but then found out that not enough teams had qualified for the next round to justify a special schedule and we were informed that although we’d have a few absences, we would have regular classes.

I therefore found myself standing in front of a class and saying “Why am I here” to the soccer and baseball players.

Since then, I’m pretty sure a couple of my colleagues have spent time after school coaching the various team to make sure they play at peak performance. I’ve considered making my athletes run laps around the room to help keep them in shape.

But that’s a problem for next year. Until then, I have a long lunch break tomorrow, which causes other problems.