At the Changchun Foreign Language School my classroom was a listening lab. It was a difficult room to teach in since the kids all sat behind glass partitions and had computers to play on.

Technorati Tags: Changchun

Materials Needed:

• Deck of specially labeled playing cards
• Blackboard (to keep score)

Instructions: (I play the game with cards because I’ve not been able to make a wheel durable enough to withstand my students; unfortunately, CARDS OF FORTUNE! is a stupid name for a game.)

Teacher prepares a deck of cards, some given monetary values, some labeled as “Bankrupt!” cards, and the rest marked as whatever special cards you want. I’ve found the most success using a deck of 14 cards broken down like this: 4 $100 cards, 3 $150 cards, 2 $250 cards, 1 $500 card, 2 Bankrupt! cards, 1 Pick Again! card, 1 Lose a Turn! card.The game follows the rules of Wheel of Fortune. Student picks a card from the deck and, if she picked a money card, guesses a letter. If the letter occurs in the sentence, the student gets the amount of money on the card for each instance of the letter in the sentence. So if the previous sentence was written on the board (poor students!), a student drawing a $100 card and guessing the letter “e” would get $2100 for her team.

Helpful Hints:Remember that the number 250 can mean “You’re stupid” in Chinese. Here in Northeast it does, I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere. My students all seem to enjoy geting a big laugh at the expense of whoever drew the $250 card, and no one seems to get their feelings hurt, but it’s just something you might want to be aware of.Additionally, my students get a really big kick out of the idea that the value of the cards is in American Dollars, so you might want to play up the foreign currency aspect of the game.

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One of the activities I liked to do with my high school kids was having Q&A or Tell-Me-About-Yourself sessions. It took the kids most of the first semester to feel comfortable enough to talk in detail about their lives outside of school.

Once they opened up, quite a few of their responses have been pretty funny:

“My mother’s favorite words are ‘I told you!’ and ‘It’s time for you to do homework!’ My father’s favorite words are ‘What are we having for dinner tomorrow night?’”

“My favorite activities are thinking about myself and looking in the mirror.”

Some of the stories were not so funny:

Student: “When I was younger one day I fell into a hole.”
Me: [Laughing] “Well, what happened? What did you do while you were in the hole?”
Student: [Serious] “I sat and thought about my life.”
Me: [Still laughing]
Student: “The found me after eight hours.”
Me: [Suddenly not laughing]

It tuns out that she had fallen into a three meter deep pit in the sidewalk. It’s not uncommon to come across unmarked, hand dug, goddamn deep holes. Holes that are left unfilled pretty quickly get filled with trash from apartments. The hole my student fell into was being dug for sewer line repairs–the workers had taken off for the day leaving their excavation unmarked. She sat in the dark for a third of a day with busted sewer pipes to keep her company.

Yeah, I felt pretty awful about laughing.

Technorati Tags: teaching, changchun, china

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The other day I happened to be in the office while a new student was being registered. The student, a boy who is probably seven years old, was there with his mother. The TA’s were telling the mother about the help available for students outside of class when the boy interrupted:
“Oh, I won’t need any extra help from you. All my Mom’s boyfriends are foreigners.”

I must have been the only person in the office who heard him since I sure as hell was the only one who laughed.

Technorati Tags: china, teaching, faux pas

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