Sick Leave and Club Activities

Hello!

Had to take a sick day this past week from school, which was part of the reason why I did not write last week. Was trying to fight off some sickness.

I was able to make it into school for most of the day on Monday but ended up taking Tuesday off to recuperate. Things seem fine now.

We have paid sick leave here, but there are some complicated rules around using it. In order to take it, we have to visit and get a receipt from a doctor dated the same day for which we take sick leave. Then that receipt covers us for up to four days of sick leave.

Overall, we get 20 days of paid sick leave. But, another quirky rule is that if we take one day off for sick leave and then take another day a few weeks later (within a month of the first day), then they count every day from the first day of sick leave until the second day as one big period of sick leave and deduct the total number of days in the period from your sick leave bank.

So, if you take a day this week for sick leave, then take a day off next week, you essentially get 5 or so days of sick leave taken away from your bank even though you only took two. Also, if you are sick on a Friday and a Monday, then 4 days of sick leave are taken from your balance (counts Saturday and Sunday as sick leave days).

I am not sure if this is just an English teacher thing or if rules like this apply to regular teachers. It definitely encourages you not to take sick leave and make it as short as possible. Or, make sure you get the sickness over with and not need to take any further time off in the future.

While I was at school, I have been able to visit some of the other club activity practices. Recently, I went to practices for badminton, volleyball and basketball. The practices operated similarly to what I described for other sports - it seems like they are mostly player run and coaches kind of float in and out, or around the practice.

For the badminton practice, a third year player seemed to have the practice plan and be coordinating what was happening. The coach dropped in for a little bit to observe then left again.

Both boys and girls basketball seem to operate similarly.

Baseball seems to be one of the few sports that has coaches involved for most of the practice. It could depend on time of year, though - if there are not any major tournaments going on, perhaps that is when the coaches leave practices to the players.

Across all sports, another commonality seems to be a focus on doing repetitions over and over again. The teams look to have certain drill packages setup and they just run through those constantly. Overall, the level of the teams is fairly impressive - the players take everything pretty seriously.

Our school's team continued in the prefectural baseball tournament. After getting a first round bye, they have won two more games. The next game will be at Hotto Motto Field, which is where local pro teams play. But, it will be on a Tuesday during the school day, so no one will really be able to go.

Seems to be that our program is one the higher level ones in our prefecture. They received one of the top 16 seeds for the summer tournament (out of 100+ teams). A pretty large supporter crowd plus the brass band came to their latest game.

I could see the school breaking through to Koshien at some point, but they'll always face the difficulty of getting by the private teams in our area. These schools can recruit players from all over Japan.

I think I have mentioned it before, but a lot of kids are in the program - at least 60 or 70 kids. This is way more than most of the other sports clubs. The next biggest club might be boys volleyball, from what I have seen.

Until next time,

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