::A Geek in Korea::

In my final children’s class of the year, I played a game of Uno with students. These particular boys are really troublesome, so I took to playing with students for the last few minutes of class each day. Stars, stickers, points, and punishments didn’t really keep their attention, but the promise of a new game or an art project has improved their behavior to at least a tolerable level for the past month. They appreciate the immediacy of the bribe, because they learn a new game each time. The only problem is that eventually even I will run out of games to play with them.

We played the standard “Crazy 8″ style game at first to warm them up to the rules. The students couldn’t say “Reverse” properly, didn’t know about wild cards, etc. Anyway, the first time we played the game lasted a few minutes. I know that with these particular students, if one of the boys doesn’t win IMMEDIATELY he will sabotage any game. If we continued playing short, rapid fire games we’d never be sure he would win fast enough to sate his competitive dickishness.

We started tweaking the rules. We added the “draw till you can play” rule, as well as the “Draw two/Draw four” defense, where you can block a Draw Two or Draw Four wild card with one of your own, passing on the draw to the next player. Soon there were situations where we were drawing twelve cards, then if we couldn’t play we’d draw a few more cards on top. We’d have a third of the deck in our hand at one time, and were never in any serious risk of finishing the game. The benefit of this game is that it almost never ends, but I was sort of running on a time limited budget.

I only play these sort of games after we finish all our work on the last day. Most of the time the games are more structured and finite in their duration. This was burning more time than I am usually comfortable with, but the students were enjoying it so I didn’t mind too much. I never play Uno in class because students will want to play it over and over again, but these students never see the same game twice, so they won’t get into that habit with me.

This was the same style of Uno my brother and I would play when my family was driving to Alaska and had hours upon hours to kill. As nice as it would be to play a game for a few hours at work, I needed to call a time limit and count the cards at the end to declare the winner. The kids have a month’s worth of vacation, and I have a few months to think up a few new ways to entertain them when we start the class again in January.