By Asa Marshall

On Saturday, January 25th from 10am to 3pm, Japanese Plus had a booth at the 2020 Multilingual Education Fair of DC at Roosevelt High School, held by the DC Language Immersion Project that featured 150+ exhibitors, 18+ languages and career connections.

At our booth we were spreading the word of our program and getting contact information for those interested in applying for the next school year as well as those interested in pre-ordering the new Japan in DC book I was happy to be featured in. I was not that excited to work the booth at first, because it was my birthday and it wasn’t the ideal situation to be doing community service activities but I don’t regret it. I had the first shift from 9am to 11am and me and Katie helped Sally set up and work the booth.

It was cool walking around seeing all of the programs in DC I never heard of! I enjoyed the JICC (Japan Information and Culture Center) booth the most, because they visited our class many times and everyone was so nice and I felt accomplished when I could answer their mini quiz! I entered a goodie bag giveaway and actually won! I was also very interested in the many other languages and travel programs, and one I never thought was offered in DC was German.

There were so many great programs that students hardly hear about, so the fair was a great way to allow the public to get language and career connections. DCPS languages are very restricted to focusing on romance languages, such as French and Spanish, but it would be more helpful for programs such as ours and those of other languages to be more open, because students have far more interests than what school offers! If you get the chance, you should definitely consider attending next year!