Letters

Effectively enforcing eloquent English expression

English escapades from class 5D

2 min read

education english school skills language repetition game formative

Today I managed to snag three stars from two classmates. Let me explain. the protagonist clears his prepubescent throat. Out comes a distinct alto voice trained in some Hindustani Classical music.

This is a game that my classy class teacher conjured up. She wants us to actively improve conversational English as we stand at the cusp of magnificently mortifying middle school. The rules of the game are-

Every student starts with 5 paper stars they craft and personalize. They have to give up one star to the student who catches them speak a language other than English (usually Hindi, but could be anything else really). At the end of the week, whoever loses all their stars are made to deliver a two minute impromptu speech in english. Whoever gets the most stars gets to relax for a day on the whole english speaking thing AND redistribute their extra stars to the ones who have less than five. A rising tide lifts all the boats. And guess what, it did just that!

Conclusion of the experiment- we could speak and think in english at will without subconsciouly switching to other languages. This feat just took a month for our preteen prefrontal cortices to pick up.

I also realized the following-

You could gamify even the most mundane minutiae and will a bunch of pavlovian primitive preteens into anything you desire as a result.

I’ll return to my religious Pokemon (5 PM) and Digimon (5:30 PM) ritual on Cartoon Network.

Fin