Broken Spines, Open Minds

“The Tribe has spoken.” 

Every student loves a good review game.  In fact, if I could just play review games in my class, I think my students would never leave.  Not only do games engage them, but as students have told me in the past, they are especially helpful for them to remember the information, especially when it comes to vocabulary.  Pair a good game up with pop culture, and it will always be a success.  

Recently, I was able to teach the other language arts teachers at my school a game called, “Survivor.” I didn’t make up this game, but it has always been a student favorite in my class.  It was actually more entertaining to watch the teachers play it instead.  I highly recommend this game for any content/grade level.  It is also great because it doesn’t take any prep or paper.

Here are the directions:

*Use this game as a review for any content area.  It does help if you have the possible answers written on the board for students, if necessary.*

Set up:

Explain to the kids about the game “Survivor” if they haven’t seen it before. Explain the idea behind having alliances.

ROUND 1:

1) Have students sit on their desk

2) Explain to students that you will ask a question. If they know the answer, they need to raise their hand.  (I let them know that if they are annoying me by talking, I won’t call on them.  Works every time.)

3) You will randomly call on a student.  If they get it right, they can vote one person off of the island.  Remind them that this is where their alliances will come into play.

4) If they get the question wrong, that student sits down.  At that point (after you have a student in their seat), any student that is sitting down can be called on and “saved” by me. (This helps with keeping the students engaged that are sitting in their chairs and have been voted off the island.)

5) Last person on their desk wins the game.  For round two, that person is “immune” from being voted off the island for the first two questions.

ROUND 2:

1) Everyone sits on their desk again. Give students time to form new alliances or confirm their old ones.

2) The game is the same, except this time, a student can either vote ONE student off of the island or can bring TWO students back up.  The one catch is that a student can only be brought up ONE time during this round.  However, I can bring a student up as many times as necessary.  (If I am running out of time, I let them vote five students down or whatever is needed.)

3) Play until there is only ONE student that has survived.

ROUND 3:

1) Bring the winners up from Round 1 and Round 2. Have them face off in opposing desks in front of the room. It’s more fun if you have a buzzer device between them, but they can always just slap their hand on the desk for the buzzer.

2) Read off a question. The first person to hit the buzzer doesn’t get to answer the question.  Instead, they must choose someone from the audience to answer it for them.  This is the part that makes alliances more fun.  The person in the audience can decide if they want to answer the question correctly or not. If they get it correct, the person up front gets a point.  If they don’t, the other person gets the point.  *If a student hits the buzzer before I am done with my question, then the opponent gets to choose someone from the audience. This makes them work on their listening skills.*

3) I usually play until the first person gets five points and is declared the ultimate survivor.  

So, do kids want to play games AND learn at the same time? YES!  The tribe has spoken.

Here you go, @elviajedelaesperanza!

Short story ideas?

Gilman’s “The yellow wallpaper” is a classic for a reason.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is jaw-droppingly gripping for basically anyone who is familiar with the Hunger Games.

“A good man is hard to find” is gorgeous and perfect and creepy (frankly, you can’t go wrong with any of Flannery O'Connor).

“Tell Tale Heart” by Poe is his best, and more accessible short story (“The Black Cat” is nice as well, plus the old staple “Cask of Amontillado.” “Fall of the House of Usher” is good too, and you could pair it with Bradbury’s “Usher II” with interesting results.

I always do a lesson at the beginning of the year where I play the first two minutes of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” just asking students to tell me what they heard. Usually they reply with “drums,” or “guitar,” or in one odd-case “a lot of right cymbal.” 

Then, I play the classic SNL skit wherein Will Ferrell jumps around with a cowbell and Christopher Walken (as THE Bruce Dickinson) demands more and more cowbell. The kids laugh (this is a great Friday lesson) and I say that we’re going to listen to the exact same song clip as before. 

As “Don’t Fear the Reaper” starts again, the kids’ eyes go wide as suddenly, they hear it. Some swear I switched out the .mp3, others bob their head, desperate to keep track of the dull, repetitive thud buried in the mix. They can’t believe they didn’t hear it before. 

I often pair this activity with The House, something I learned from Cris Tovani, a family acquaintance, and someone who donated her entire set of books to me the year I graduated high school to wish me luck on my career. I’m very grateful.

At the end of the lesson, I ask why we listened to the song twice. What changed? They think for a moment and eventually discuss as a class that they had different purposes for listening, they had new knowledge so they picked out different details. They same way Disney movies have jokes for adults, you notice different things upon multiple readings. 

I then transfer that to my ELA classroom. We will re-read things multiple times with multiple purposes. Throughout the year, I mention that “we gotta find that cowbell,” meaning we have to delve deeper into the text we’re working with. I love this lesson and it’s such a clear metaphor for the kids to grasp.

-words have roles, sentences perform tasks; a cluttered sentence is like a rube goldberg machine, fascinating in its way but, in most cases, too slow to accomplish its task and liable to “break” grammatically

-a pronoun is a boat held by rope to a dock; when the rope breaks, the boat drifts away and it’s hard, if not impossible, to tell which dock it belongs to (the rope is syntax, the dock the pronoun’s referent; this one works better when you make the kids stand up and act it out)

linguistic prescriptivists often insist that one needs to learn “the rules” before breaking them. the problem is that there aren’t, or shouldn’t be, “rules” to english; there are conventions, and those conventions arise so people can better understand each other. imposing rules and restrictions on language is frustrating for students who understand “wrong” english just fine, and dictatorial approaches to language understandably strike them as useless and petty. what we should be doing is teaching writing as a form of communication, where conventions change according to context and audience.

so as i’ve written elsewhere, one of my favorite assignments is “make the same argument in wildly different genres” (not the snappiest name, but there you are), where students come up with a position and write their argument as a string of text messages to a parental figure, a facebook rant, a letter to a legislator, an op-ed, and an academic essay. it’s a fun assignment, in part because most students are good w/audience already and don’t realize it–but it’s also a descriptivist approach which simultaneously teaches academic writing conventions and shows respect for different communication styles. it is, in fact, more effective at teaching academic writing, because it enables students to see and articulate the differences between various styles + explain the reasons for the differences.

basically, i try to focus on usefulness and clarity. the problem isn’t that you’re “breaking a rule”; the problem is that your reader–this particular reader, in this particular context–is liable to become confused. a cluttered and/or circuitous sentence suggests confusion on your part, and creates the same in your reader. an unclear pronoun reference forces your reader to puzzle out the referent. passive voice, while not “ungrammatical,” is undesirable when it’s needlessly indirect and adds unnecessary words to the sentence.

Expressing my love for the written word the next best way I know how—through illustration and typography. Here’s to all the books that kept us up at night, the pages we turn to for comfort, and to all the words yet to be written.

To motivate you to beat your reading goals for the year, I’ve created a 2017 calendar out of these designs—with each month having its own bookish illustration. If that’s your thing, you can check the calendar here.