Cinnabar and Alabaster

"my computer had a virus," one student explains (the logistical snafus never end). "so my e-mail's been broken. that's why you haven't heard from me. i have everything in hard copy, though."
"hard copy is like cash," he assures her; "it still works in most places."

at 8:14 the 2 girls they were waiting for come in with handbooks--they'd gone back to their dorms to fetch them--and the rest are still idling in front of computers or scanning the web. over the next 5 minutes 2 more of them appeared, so he tired of waiting with a total of 8--2 teams of 4 at least made his intentions plausible.

he calls them together up to the front of the room, assigning them to groups & telling them to get together, & puts instructions for the game on the board: for each sentence he puts up, they have 3 minutes to locate/identify the problems with its commas (1st team to do so correctly gets 10 points), then the winning team gets a chance that bumps over if they fail to name the problem in grammar-speak for 5, then they have 3 minutes to compete to find the relevant sections in their handbooks for 10, and for 5 each at the end can point out any other problems in the sentence. "i didn't want to lecture at you," he explains, "because talking about grammar can be as boring as anything on the entire planet, so i wanted to have a little fun with it. if i were making more money, i'd have a prize for the winning team, but you'll have to make do with honest competition." i'm designated as the judge of good revisions & the tie-breaker for disagreements, which i manage okay--i concur with most of his assessments, have purely stylistic disagreements with one, and do a probably inarticulate job of trying to explain the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, which is really not easy to do without a whiteboard marker that works to make examples with.

as a class, in the time they have left, they only get through 3 of his 9 sentences, both because the many-stage nature of the game has them spending a lot of time on each one and because they're all lethargic about the whole affair--or perhaps just in general. each step takes coaxing each time, and is met with a lot of quiet resistance. "i don't know. i haven't done this since 6th grade. who's got a book?" i don't suppose it's ever easy to get excited about grammar, games or otherwise, and he'll pace it differently next time--you never know how these things will play out until you run them with real students in real rooms. and i'd wager that with 20 students NOT at 8am he'd have stirred up more interaction, movement, engagement (if not earnest enthusiasm).

i like the idea. i'd tweak it, but i always tweak my own after i run them too--games are also on my list of things i need to work on b/c other people do them quite effectively, and variety is always supposed to be better for students and classes--when you're predictable, or at least when i'm predictable, people assume they won't learn anything new by coming & stay home. i wouldn't, however, admit to them that i was trying something new. confidence counts, & grumpy morning-faces aren't usually the best responders to being cheerfully made guinea-pigs of. well. i say that. i usually admit too much of that stuff--i'm not good at keeping secrets either. i'll settle for i'd advise against it, and probably fail to follow my own advice!

watching dave's classes and working with him has been fantastic. that's the short answer. the long one will have to wait until i'm more caught up with writing about my own!