Changes Come To International Day
Annie Rebbe - Staff Writer
April 6, 2010
Filed under Features
For years, International Day has been an important activity of the Westminster language department. This year, though, it came with some changes to make it more organized.
“[International Day] used to be pretty much chaos,” said Joan Dudley, upper school Spanish teacher and head of the language department.
So International Day organizers, including foreign language teachers, implemented changes this year to fix this problem. The biggest change, said Dudley, was the moving of the event form the Commons to the Old Gym. This larger space allowed for more tables to be set up, and meant that it was less crowded.
“In years previous, there’s been a lot of pushing and shoving, since there wasn’t much room in the Commons for all of the people.”
According to Dudley, the move to the gym also made lines shorter.
“It used to be that the tables with the food on them would be right up against the wall, so people couldn’t go around to the other side of them, which caused really long lines. Now, though, since there’s more room in the Old Gym, students can access both sides of the tables, and so the lines are not nearly as long,” she said.
Students seemed to share this opinion.
“I thought the wait and lines were so much better this year,” said Alex Langley, junior. “Last year, when the tables were set up in the Commons, there were lines going all the way into the Middle School hallway. But this year, there weren’t really any lines at all.”
International day was started by Florence Lewis, upper school Latin teacher, over fifteen years ago. It was, according to Dudley, originally only four tables of food set up in the cafeteria, at which language students would stand and explain their dishes to the students eating them. It has grown significantly since then—this year a total of 603 language students participated.
International Day’s purpose is to celebrate cultures other than America’s, and the differences between them.
“One of the biggest parts of any culture is its food, so food is a good way to celebrate and experience other cultures.” says Dudley, “It’s also good that students get the opportunity to use and follow an authentic recipe, use ingredients different from what they would normally use, and cook in ways that might be new to them. So it’s a learning experience in two ways–students get to both cook and eat food from other cultures”.
She said there are few things she will change next year.
“We may try to improve the card labeling system, because there were some problems. But generally I think the changes worked very well, and we were very happy with how it went this year.”
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