This is something the great Justin Slocum Bailey taught me:
if kids can compete, and if it can be hilarious, that's a beautiful classroom tool.
I think about that approximately every other week.
How long can kids balance coins on their nose? Great question. No idea, but I can reinforce quamdiu that way.
Right now, we're talking about athletes and actors and other forms of entertainment, and I'm beginning to realize how much longer it takes to smush indirect speech into their brains than approximately everything else. So I'm using it a lot.
Check out my Latin II classes this week, which have been seventy minutes long (usually they're 52), and I keep looking at the clock and realizing the bell is going to ring in ten seconds, and I'm still on my warm-up (because they've dived into it, and it's beautiful).
1. Any super-well-known (notissimi) athletes in this room? Whom do you think is the best athlete in the room? Ask fifteen people that question, and they get fifteen repeats of quem athletam optimum in hoc conclavi esse censes?. They also, since I've written ___________m athletam optimum in hoc conclavi esse censeo on the board, get to say it without panicking about how it's said 15 times.
2. Narrow it down to two or three kids. Make them do ridiculous stuff. How long do you think Ian can stand on one foot? What's the heaviest thing you think Tyler can lift? We're blessed to have a pull-up bar on the field right outside my classroom, so you'd better believe the question "quotiens Latrellem se tollere posse censes?" came up. You'd better believe we trooped outside to see exactly how many times Latrell could do a pullup. (the answer is twenty. class went nuts. latrell --> very proud of himself. also mildly sore.) I can ask that question about twenty-five times. I can also ask it right before the pull-up bar. Who thinks Latrell can do four pull-ups? Three? Seven? Not even one?
That was yesterday.
Today: We're going to talk about actors. The class knows who its good actors are, because those are the kids who often volunteer to do it, and whom the class wants to see do it.
So we talk for a while about who we think the best actors are. (this question - the "who do you think is the best/strongest/whateverest XYZ - almost never gets old. i can ask the same style of question for days, and they don't care. my first period argued FOR AN HOUR about who the best actor in the history of the world is, and my first period cares about nothing. For what it's worth, they don't think it's Liam Hemsworth, but they have real feelings regarding Kevin Hart.)
I eventually settled on three actors, told the class we were going to do five scenes. (target vocab: scaenam agere; eadem) All the actors would do the same five scenes (in which I can also use target vocab like histrio, discedere, carcer). Imitate a hungry lion (personam suscipere). Imitate a person trying to get out of jail. Take on the role of a person thrown down by hope.
Increasingly, the kids' scenes are hysterical. The students love watching this, the actors get attention, and you get endless repetitions of whatever you want. I NEVER end this competition by deciding who wins, because you end up with potentially hurt feelings there. But you can ask questions like, "who do you think is the best lion," because that isn't an overall question. Or "who do you think is a dramatic actor/tragic actor/comic actor." Target vocab, target structures, repetition, no hurt feelings. We applaud everybody, the actors are heroes, and I have no idea where seventy minutes have gone, but man there's been a lot of really good input in the last seventy minutes. And that input has real emotional ties, and it's stuff the kids aren't going to forget.
As an aside...I made the terrible mistake of giving them the instruction personam mei suscipere. The children...they know me well. And heck if they didn't pretend, down to verbatim the Latin things I tell them every day, to be me. Turns out repetition works?
A word of warning on some of these: read your room. You want to make sure you set up competition that is entirely friendly and completely useless. If it's going to result in hurt feelings, kids being on the spot, or judginess, this is NOT the way to go. Sam can move an Oreo down his face like nobody's business. That is a good, solid, useless competition.
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