Hey, anything for the children. ^.^
With most of my classes, if we finish the scheduled lesson early and have some free time at the end of class, I’m willing to play a game. It’s got to have some educational benefit, but that’s a pretty loose qualifier. Hangman counts. Playing bingo with vocabulary words counts. Spelling Bees count.You get the idea.I find regular hangman pretty dull though. Especially after the 500th time of playing it. To try and liven things up, I play it differently than the traditional method. Instead of a gallows, I draw a staircase heading down into the ocean. At the bottom of the staircase is a big shark. At the top is a stick figure.
Above the stick figure is a student’s name.
For every letter missed I draw a curved arrow indicating one step down the staircase. One step closer to the shark. Depending on how well-liked the student on the staircase is, the game can go two ways. If they’re popular, the class puts a genuine effort into solving the puzzle. If they’re not, the letters Z, X, W, V, J, K, Q and F come out in rapid succession. I usually make a 13-step staircase, so that’s over half the distance right there.
If a student goes all the way into the water, I draw a stick figure head in the sharks mouth and an assortment of stick limbs in the water around the shark. (This was better at my old school, since I had a whiteboard and a red marker. You get the idea.) If they manage to solve the puzzle, I’ll draw a boat in the water and put a happy stick person on it, showing that that student has survived.
Dead students get drawn as sad angels hovering over the boat – in addition to being drawn as shark food.
Now, what does all of this have to do with the title of this entry? I’m getting to that. I just had to set the stage is all.
I played shark hangman today in one of my classes. We only had time for one game and, much to the class’ dismay, the student survived. They were in a bloodthirsty mood apparently, and wanted to see the shark eating somebody. The started yelling out each others’ names, but I said one of them couldn’t go to the shark without playing the game.
So they moved on.
“Kill Bushie!” was the next suggestion. I laughed at that, then somebody yelled, “Kill Noh Mu-hyun!” That one caught me off-guard, since that’s the current president of Korea. I don’t have anything against Mr. Noh, so the shark got a Bushie snack. It was just a stick person’s head labeled as Bush, but they accepted it. Then one of the boys asked me where I was from. I told him America and the class got deathly quiet.
“What?” I asked.
“But you kill Bushie!” several of them said, pointed at the board. 7th graders with their English level aren’t really up for a complex decision of American politics and free speech issues, so I simply told them, “I don’t like him.” They didn’t quite grasp the concept of criticizing one’s leaders (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense), and with two minutes left in class I wasn’t going to get into it.
Maybe next time.
Now that I’ve finished writing this, I’m questioning the wisdom of actually posting it. I’m going to, but I do wonder what sort of NSA webcrawler I’m going to attract. I’m not overly concerned, since I think a crude drawing of a shark eating a stick man’s head labeled as “Bushie” is still constitutionally protected speech. I mean, if you can burn the president in effigy, I can draw a shark eating his head, right?I guess we’ll find out….