Games and highschoolers are a weird combination. On the one hand, high schoolers hate traditional lecturing so they're all ways suggesting stuff like "Mr. Chan, can we play a game?" But once they start playing a game you start hearing a lot of whining: "That's not fair!", "Can we stop playing this game?", "Can we just sit around and talk?", etc.
My troubles all began with
my our impending trip to New York. Casey and I decided to schedule the second diagnostic while we were gone, since it would require very little work from the sub. So, being the good foolish teacher that I am, I decided to have a review week! On Wednesday I decided to do a review session and to toss out Japanese (Kasugai) gummies to students that answered. That worked pretty well, but the initial reaction to the candy went something like this.
[Student catches candy]
[Looks at candy]
[Squints, unable to read the wrapper]
[Realizes it is in another language]
[Eyes it suspiciously]
[Eats foreign candy]
Student: Hrm. Not bad! Mr. Chan, where did you get these?
Me: From the store. And I want everyone to know that I'm not Japanese.
So they ended up liking it. Which was cool. The funny thing was that on Friday we played Jeopardy and they came up with their own team names. Here's a picture of the board:
Notice that one of the students decided to name their name some of the Japanese characters they found on the wrapper. I thought it was very funny. And very difficult. Because now I didn't know what to call their team. Shrug.
I know that people in Ennis probably don't have any access to the kind of cultural diversity I take for granted. One of my dreams is to invite a Japanese chef to come and make sushi for my whole class. It'd be fun to watch different people get grossed out. It'd also be cool to see if some of the kids enjoyed it too.
Back to Jeopardy. So in the end, it seemed like everyone had fun, but it was so much work that I'm having second thoughts about doing that again. Which is too bad since I loved (and still love) playing Jeopardy.
Notice that one of the students decided to name their name some of the Japanese characters they found on the wrapper. I thought it was very funny. And very difficult. Because now I didn't know what to call their team. Shrug.
I know that people in Ennis probably don't have any access to the kind of cultural diversity I take for granted. One of my dreams is to invite a Japanese chef to come and make sushi for my whole class. It'd be fun to watch different people get grossed out. It'd also be cool to see if some of the kids enjoyed it too.
Back to Jeopardy. So in the end, it seemed like everyone had fun, but it was so much work that I'm having second thoughts about doing that again. Which is too bad since I loved (and still love) playing Jeopardy.
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