The construction of the game was a(n?) Herculean task! First I had to think of a game that related to what we were doing in class. I thought of the game Whozit that my family played when I was young. We had just finished talking about jobs in class and were concentrating on present tense questions. PERFECT! So I surfed the net for hours and hours choosing just the right pictures of people of varying race, age, and gender doing interesting jobs. Then I had to make the pictures the right size to not only fit on a game board but onto little cards too. Then I had to print out five copies of the board pics, (24 jobs in all so that's 120), and 120 job cards. I had to take them to the print shop down the street because my printer ran out of ink as I was doing it. There I also bought 5 boards, some lamination paper to stick on the boards and I got them to laminate all the cards. Four cards to a page so that's 30 pages of lamination. Plus I copied out some homework for this week. It all cost me about $30.00. I took everything home and measured, cut and pasted for a few hours and had a fairly decent board figured out. Then I tried to laminate the board and THIS
was the result. See all the wrinkles? But I thought I'd still be able to use it. So I started cutting out the cards. In order to try to make the cards cheat-proof, (cuz I play games A LOT and have never played one without somebody trying to cheat), I double up the paper. I put a piece of paper behind the paper with the pics on it. Not ingenius I know. So of course they separated when I cut them out. And because the lamination plastic is heated it shrinks causing the paper to bend. So the result is two bent pieces of paper. Here's a pic of the sheet of four and a pic of the curly cards you get when you cut them out.
So I figured I'd just RE-laminate them with the self-lamination paper I had bought. That sounds a lot easier than it is. This was the horrifying and demoralizing result:
SOooo, I chucked the whole works against the wall, cracked open a beer and sat down in front of the computer. I complained about the whole process on facebook and one of my friends, Sharon, was also online. She was very supportive. After cooling down a bit I decided I'm not the kind of guy to give up that easily. I'm too stupid. So I went down to the stationary store AGAIN and had the whole works of cards, (for the four remaining games), laminated AGAIN. It worked! So I came home and after a couple hours of cutting and pasting I had a better board design with all the questions they could ask incorporated into the board. Then it was time to laminate again. This time I did it on the floor instead of my bed. Aside from the few hairs it picked up it was a success! This is what the new board looked like:
Not too shabby! And the cards are okay too. So it was time to test it out. I had a class on Monday that was almost ready for the game. So I brought it and with three students played it. It was a huge success! They had no problem understanding what to do because I was playing with them and they just learned as we went along. I didn't TELL them, I SHOWED them.
Then I went home and it took me all night but I made the rest of the boards for my good class on Tuesday. My big class. The ones who were nice enough to throw me a teachers day party. This morning, (Tuesday), I went in with 4 games all ready to give them the game they wanted. I explained in English and the looks got blanker and blanker and I got sweatier and sweatier. You have to understand with a class of 50 you can't sit down and play with everyone. I had to try to explain. I wished I could SHOW them but I had to try to TELL them. The game is fairly simple. Every person gets a card. That is their character. Written on the card is every possible answer to every possible question and all possible questions are written on the gameboard. Each person asks one question to one person at a time. They take notes on the answers. After many questions if they think they know the identities of every other player they guess. You can only guess on your turn and if you don't guess all other players correctly, it's the next player's turn. When someone guesses everybody correctly they win.
When you try to explain something you are fighting all kinds of inherent problems in the Korean student.
First of all their listening skills, no matter WHAT the language, are abysmal. For English, even worse.
Secondly there are always a couple of "translators" in the class. They think they are helping but what they are doing is discouraging learning. 48 people tune out while the English explanation is giving them a chance to improve their listening skills and 2 people listen and try to translate as I'm explaining. Usually they translate wrong or the others HEAR wrong. What they don't realize is if they ALL listen to the explanation in English maybe NObody will understand it all but if they work together and combine what they each understood, they'll get the gist.
Thirdly for most Korean students, the gist is nowhere near enough for them to have the confidence to start playing. They feel, (wrongly), that they need to understand every nuance, every facet, every jot and tittle of the game before they can begin to play it.
Fourthly, while I am explaining there are always a lot of people talking, in Korean, thinking that they'll just get someone else to explain it to them in Korean.
Fifthly, Koreans ALWAYS want to learn English through Korean. They're trained that way. So there are going to be things that don't really translate well.
Sixthly, when they know it's a game they get eager to play and they don't finish listening. They assume they know what I'm gonna say, even the translators, and they start playing the wrong way.
For example, the first group I went to was all asking questions to one person. Then they were all guessing willy nilly trying to get the one person's identity. Then when someone got it right they asked questions to the next person. So I had to demonstrate. Another group was just sitting there. Some were talking on their phones some were sleeping so I went to them. I told the first person to ask a question. He said he couldn't cuz he didn't know how to play the game. "Just do it!" I said about 5 times. Finally he picks up the board and studies it for 10 minutes and says, "Are you a man?" All the other players say, "Yes, no, no, yes, no." I'm thinking, "WHAT THE F?" "NO," I exclaim, "One person, one question." Then the next person asks the same person a question. Then the next person then the next. All to the same person. Another group calls me over and says they don't understand. So I go over. One of them is looking through the cards that haven't been dealt out. SIGH! I take all the cards and deal out new ones. "Okay, now ask any question," I say. She looks at her card. She's the ballerina, "Are you the ballerina?" she asks. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!
Every group was having every problem you could think of. And some you can't. We spent about 80 minutes struggling with the game and not one of the four groups figured it out. It took 2 minutes for me to explain and start doing it in my Monday class. This is why we shouldn't EVER have classes of 50. It's counterproductive to any kind of education. It's okay for training but not education.
The thing is, in the game when a person guesses everybody is supposed to put a piece of paper with "YES" or "NO" written on it into a container so that the person who guesses is the only one who knows how many were right or wrong. But he/she doesn't know who. I DIDN'T EVEN DO THAT PART. I just let them give answers verbally because they were all having such a hard time figuring out the easy part of the game.
Try to explain this to my boss. All I can say is I can't do some things with such a big class. He just thinks I'm being lazy cuz I don't want to mark that many exams or correct that many homework assignments.
Anyway, some days my job IS pretty good. But then again some days it ISN'T!
*In case you don't know you can click on any picture to get the full sized image. For some of these you need to.
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