As I mentioned in my introduction post, I teach English at a community college. The bulk of my course load is made up by freshman composition courses because nearly every degree program offered by our institution requires at least one English credit. Of course, this means that my classes are frequently populated by students who are obviously bored or even openly resentful of having to “waste” their time in a class that they perceive as having nothing to do with their desired career paths.
I can sympathize; I felt the same way about the math courses I had to take as an undergrad. Every time I sat down to grind through my math homework, I grumbled about how I’d never need any of this information to teach literature.
I do genuinely believe the subject I teach is useful for almost all students, no matter their major, but I recognize the bias in that statement—job security and all that. And I can tell my students all day long that I’m not wasting their time, that they really can learn something worth knowing in my class, but they don’t buy it quite that easily. Since I’m actually invested in student success, and since a surly student isn’t usually the best learner, I spend a great deal of time each semester trying to win hearts and minds.
One of the most effective ways I go about doing that is by finding the fun and silliness in what can, quite frankly, be a rather dry topic of study. I catch my fair share of side-eye from some of my colleagues about it, but I play a lot of games in my classroom. It comes as a shock to many of my students, too; they think of games as something for elementary and middle school students—hell, even many high school kids have grown exasperated with (read: “too cool for”) classroom games. Like that of many community colleges, our student body consists of a large number of “non-traditional” students, and they are some of the most wary when it comes time for one of my educational games. But I usually win them over.
My favorite game to play in my English 1301 classes (basic Freshman Comp) is a card game called Superfight. You can check it out on the Superfight site or on Amazon. I pull this game out toward the last quarter of each semester when I’m teaching argument writing and analysis, and I can always count on some positive student mentions in the end-of-year learner surveys my college administers.
The basic version of the game has two types of cards, white “character” cards and black “attribute” cards. Gameplay revolves around two players at a time each building a “fighter” created with one character card and two attribute cards while remaining players watch and judge. Each active player argues why his/her fighter would win in a battle with the other player’s fighter, and when the arguments are complete, the judge players vote on who wins the round. There are also expansion decks that can add layers of specificity and/or difficulty to the game, such as the yellow Challenge Deck that introduces specific situations the fighters are competing in (as opposed to simply fighting each other physically). I use the yellow deck in my classroom version of the game, and I adjust some of the rules to make the game better fit my lesson goals.
When I run the game in class, I split the students into several small groups (no more than four students per group) and have them choose team names (full disclosure: this is mostly for my own entertainment). I explain the basics of gameplay—on their turns, each team selects one character card from the three random cards I give them, I give each team two random attribute cards, and I announce the situation from the yellow deck.
The beginning of a typical round might look something like this:
Team 1’s fighter is a cowboy (white card) who can control the weather (black card) and always has to pee (black card). Team 2’s fighter is a dinosaur (white card) with chainsaws for arms (black card) that can stop time by holding its breath (black card). The situation (as determined by the yellow card) is who would make the best kindergarten teacher.
After the teams have their fighters, I give them one minute each to address the class (not me) and convince them why their team’s fighter would be the best in the given situation. Then, they each get one minute to rebut the other team’s argument. After the initial arguments and rebuttals, I have the rest of the class (those who weren’t arguing) vote on the best argument. The whole process is a laugh and a half, let me tell you, but that last bit is sometimes tricky.
For the first few rounds of play, I make sure to remind the voters that they’re not picking the funniest argument or choosing a fighter based on what they think the teams should have said but instead applying the concepts of argument and rhetoric analysis to what the teams actually said about their respective fighters. After voting, I ask the voters to explain why they voted the way they did—what parts of the arguments were most/least convincing, what they would have done differently, and so on. Sometimes I’ll ask them to identify any rhetorical appeals they can (ethos, pathos, logos), and they often point out fallacies they noticed.
Superfight day gets pretty competitive, partially because I award bonus points based on team scores but also, I like to think, because the students are getting to apply their knowledge of some rather abstract concepts without having to take an exam. It’s not unusual for me to laugh until I cry during this game, but what makes me happiest is seeing my students making concrete connections with our course material and engaging in fast-paced critical thinking and actually enjoying themselves.
So even if my students leave me at the end of the semester believing English 1301 was just an occasionally entertaining time-suck in which they learned nothing, I’ll know better because I saw their wheels turning on Superfight day.
Please feel free to share your fun teaching/learning experiences in the comments! I'm always on the hunt for new ways to bring fun into the classroom.