Game Show

After graduation, there was sort of a lull in classes. With the third-years gone, the school was a lot quieter. The students had finals right around graduation, so the term was, academically speaking, over. What confused me was that they all still had classes as normal. For me and all the folks I knew in high school, any class time after the exam was devoted to parties. Fortunately, the other English teachers more or less gave me the freedom to do that--they asked me to prepare something with "fun" being the primary objective.

I decided to have a Jeopardy!-style game show. After a fair amount of planning, troubleshooting, and consulting with the teachers, I worked it out: students would be divided into teams of four or five. Teams would take turns choosing a category and point value (rather than asking the question of everyone, and having teams race to be the first to signal--I couldn't get this to work). The questions would be worth 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 points. The categories included history, music, movies, geography, holidays, spelling, Harry Potter, and Adam. Since none of this would appear on a test, I was able to change things up as much as I wanted to between classes. Thanks to this, the game planning evolved organically, with the last iteration being completely different from the first one. (During the semester, my normal classes have to be standardized, with little to no variation allowed between versions of the lesson.)

For Holidays, I asked the students things like the date of Valentine's Day, or what kids say for candy on Halloween. For Geography, I asked questions about prefectural capitals ("Nagasaki is the capital of Nagasaki-ken. What is the capital of Hyogo-ken?") and neighboring countries ("Name two countries that border Italy," which was for 50 points). For Music, I played a song, and asked the students to identify either the artist or the title, or (for the harder questions) both. I used songs from people like Avril Lavigne ("Girlfriend"), Backstreet Boys ("I Want It That Way"--you'd be amazed at how many boys here like them), Carpenters ("On Top of the World"), the Beatles ("I Want to Hold Your Hand") and Queen ("We Are the Champions"). For Movies, I used my laptop to show the students a Youtube clip from a movie or T.V. show, and asked them something about it. I showed clips from Aladdin ("What's the girl's name?"), Full House ("Name the show," while playing the intro), and Star Wars ("Name the director," which was for 50 points). For Spelling, a student from the group would come to the board and write a word I dictated. The words ranged from Orange to Purple to Christmas to Halloween.

For History, I asked them to name the current Japanese prime minister, the first U.S. president, and the author of The Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, written in Japan. For 40 points, I read the closing paragraph from the Gettysburg Address, and asked them to tell me who gave that speech. For 50 points, I played a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and asked them the same question.

For the Adam category, I asked them questions like "Where did I work in America?" (Japanese restaurant, or something to that effect), "What is my favorite video game?" (Guitar Hero), "What state am I from?" (Georgia or Missouri), and "What is my last name?" For the Harry Potter category, I mostly asked them to name a character from the movie, based on a picture I'd show them. The pictures ranged from Ron and Hermione to Lupin, Voldemort, and (for 50 points) Bellatrix Lestrange.

Given all of this, I would have expected the hardest category to be History, and the easiest one to be Adam. Geography didn't faze them (though the neighbors of Italy stumped a few people), they plowed through Music and Movies without hesitating, and even History didn't give them trouble. Each time I started reading the Gettysburg Address, the group that had chosen it would look mortified, but everyone grinned when I came to the part about "government of the people." "I Have a Dream" gave some groups trouble (several guessed the speaker was Obama), but at least one person in every group knew it. Almost everyone avoided Spelling, at least until one group would meekly choose the 10-point question ("pink"), which would embolden everyone.

Although everyone remembered where I'm from, and where I worked (one group even remembered "Inoko"), nobody could remember my last name. I heard from the teachers later that each class was expecting the hardest Adam question to be about Uga, since on my first day I gave a mini-lesson on the proper pronunciation of his name. (Everyone here assumes it's oo-ga, and the schwa sound eludes these kids.) All things considered, though, I'm satisfied--I'd much rather the kids forget my name but be able to identify Lincoln or King, instead of the other way around.

Oh, and Bellatrix Lestrange, which I included for the express purpose of stumping the class and making an overeager team lose points, was only mildly successful. Only two groups chose it, and one of them snapped his fingers and blurted out the whole name as soon as her picture popped up. These kids know the important stuff.

After the round finished (about 5 or 10 minutes before the end of class), we tallied the scores and explained the final round. Basically, it was Final Jeopardy, though that wouldn't make sense to any of the kids here. They immediately caught the gist of it as I explained, even though I didn't use any Japanese--write your wager on a piece of paper, with your answer, and you gain or lose that number of points. I didn't usually have to artificially inflate anyone's score--with the exception of a few 0s (we made 0 the lowest possible score), there was always at least one team mathematically capable of overtaking the leader. The category was music. I played a song, and asked the class to name the composer. I wanted them to try to write it in English (spelling wouldn't count), but they could write it in Japanese if they wanted to.

The first song I chose was Fur Elise. Although practically everyone got it right (the first group I tried it with was one of my higher-level classes), that was okay--that put the importance on the wagering. The attempts at spelling Beethoven in English were amusing--Vetovun and Beitobun were my favorites, and hey, I'm pretty sure there are more people back home who can't spell his name right than can. I was so impressed that, for the next class (a mid-level group), I changed the song to the 1812 Overture. Not a single person got it, so I fell back on Fur Elise, with the same result as with the first class. For the third group (the highest-level class), I played two songs by the same composer--the same clip of the 1812 Overture, and then Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy from The Nutcracker Suite. Fearing the worst, I was pleasantly surprised to see two groups begin whispering and writing furiously. As we checked the answers, I wasn't surprised to see everything in Japanese. I was shocked, however, to see what one group had written. The same boy in the group who knew Bellatrix had written ピョートル・イリッチ・チャイコフスキー, or Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The kid knew the guy's full name. I love these kids.

Here's what it looked like before class, and this is what it looked like in the middle of the game.