Kim N Matt Schumacher comments

Having a son who is currently in 3rd year Junior high, for us it is a great idea. We are worried about how he is going to be able to catch up on the time already lost let alone the amount of time to come. The amount of school work packed into just one week of school here is hard to miss. He plays soccer and a few times a year he has time off school for toresen and finds it hard to catch up after just a short time. I’m not sure he could catch up and get good enough grades to even sit entrance exams to get into any High school here. Having Australians for Parents is not going to help him much with anything other than his English studies.

It is a nice gesture by the teams, showing respect to the fans for the support during the games. We were at the Australia versus Fiji game at Sapporo dome on Saturday and after the match the Australian team bowed to the fans also. This game was played before the New Zealand game by the way ;)

My 11 year old son, just listened to the song with me, he said, 'well that sucks more than his first song' haha

I live in a small town in Hokkaido, My Children go to a School that has only 53 kids so pretty small and most of the kids including my son either play sport or have piano dance or swimming lessons that take up most afternoons so playing video games doesn't affect study time but sport does. Although I am not sure how much more study they would like the kids to do as everyday their is always plenty of homework to be done including on weekends and holidays so I think the kids study more than enough, maybe the problem is more in the Teaching methods than the after School study time, my kids are Aussies and they attend Local Public Schools and they are not struggling at School, most likely it's because the Teachers have time to spend on each child because of the small class sizing of under 10 children per class versus the City Schools with over 30 kids per class.