Minute-To-Win-It

I came to China to teach English, but I haven't had a single student yet. Instead, I was given the task of assisting the school host a halloween party. Not really knowing what they wanted or what was or wasn't my responsibility for the party to be, I did my best to make it fun and as close to a celebration we might have in the states as possible. Basically I just relapsed into my past role as an RA.

 Trying to find Halloween supplies though, was (pardon the pun) a nightmare. I live in a city comparable in size to New York; and yet, I could not find a single tube or container of face-paint. I had to email a friend who is from China (shout out to Alex Yang) to even figure out how to ask for it. Even then all I got were blank expressions of confusion or misguided tours of a women's makeup section from various shop owners.

In the end I was able to scrounge up some witch hats and capes which I could use for activities or decorations. The school actually had some stuff left over from past years which helped a lot. To compensate for my lack of decorations I decided to make the spectacle a bit more active. If you haven't seen the game show Minute-to-win-to-it, then I'm sorry. Not only because at this point you don't know what I'm talking about, but also because it just means you haven't been laughing as much as you could. Luckily for you this is the 21st century and the internet has no higher purpose than to bring you as many amusing videos as your bandwidth can carry. For those of you who skipped the links, the basic premise is to create very silly and difficulty tasks using very mundane objects all with a sixty second time limit.

For the party I set up two such challenges. One where two contestants race each other to sort 50 skittles by color using only one hand, and then another one where someone has to shake six ping-pong balls out of a tissue box strapped to their rump (this is what is featured in the second link). The other station I set up was your standard bobbing for apples. This also became somewhat of a game show though as no one had ever heard of it before and got really competitive about it. My last role was something like that of a whisk. I was charged to mix up the guys and girls and get them all dancing. This was ALOT harder than anything minute-to-win-it had could throw my way. In the end things came together quite well, the students were very resourceful in making/finding their own costumes so the face paint wasn't necessary and after some serious encouraging they all started to dance on their own (which was good cause I needed a breather!) Here are some photos that I rounded up.

Race-The-Rainbow

Classic Michele...

Baller.

Overachievers.

Witches.