bridges

Today, myself and three other ALTs went to Kanazawa to help out a bridge-building seminar. Yes. A bridge-building seminar for high school students. It was a two day conference with about 30 Komatsu High students and five guests from a science high school in Korea. On the first day, members of each group of eight individually designed bridges using testing software and then built them out of thin balsa wood splinters. The groups chose one person's bridge to represent them for testing. Testing involved a basket of juice boxes suspended from the bridge (which was placed on a special stand to span a "valley") by means of a cable and a styrofoam anchor, which sat on the roadway part of the bridge. The bridges were tested until they broke, and on the second day, the groups analyzed the bridges and began planning together for a new one, using information given to them about arches, trusses, tension, and compression.

So, why do you need ALTs?

In addition to designing and building a winning bridge (the teams were competing for the best weight of bridge to load of juice withstood ratio) these students also had to make and give a powerpoint presentation in English. They had about five hours to do it all, tops, and most of them also worked through lunch.

The resulting bridges were gorgeous. The strongest of them, made entirely of balsa wood and crazy glue, held 18 juice boxes--3 kilos.

Most of them had names. My favorites are easily Glorious Peace and Bridge of Love (slide description: "a bridge to connect all the world LOVE"), although Legendary Bridge and King of Bridges are very good as well.

The presentations ranged in quality from "decent considering that you had to chose between practicing and building your bridge" to "on par or better than most American high school speeches, but with interesting pronunciation." I was especially proud of about a dozed students who even prepared something beyond just reading the slides, and even sometimes explained things in English on the fly.

However, "load" is a terrible word for Japanese learners of English to have to spell (for some reason, many of the bridges in the presentations I helped with had lords on them) and "glory" is a terrible, terrible word for Japanese learners of English to say. I kept asking "but what is glowing?" until the poor teacher pulled out a dictionary and spelled it out.

I'm going to have to get very, very good at psuedo-homonyms.