::A Geek in Korea::

Self-portrait?

I have one children’s camp class that is getting some recycled activities with an increase in refinement each time I practice. Today I had to do a “guessing game” activity with students with very limited comprehension, vocabulary, and minimal phonics skills. They couldn’t do much in any of the other classes I had, but this game required them to understand, play, and be able to speak well enough to ask questions to one another.

I had already done “Guess Who?” with another class, and knew I needed to refine it. Had I the time, I would have made an entire worksheet based on the premise, worked out vocabulary and made pictures to explain all the nuanced ways that those little cards are different from one another. I had 30 minutes on my lunch break, so they didn’t exactly get all that. We worked through facial vocabulary, then went to work building the question structures so that they could properly play the game.

As a throw away exercise at the end of one oddly time class before the game started, I had the students make a self-portrait. I never make students do anything potentially embarrassing without modeling it myself, so of course I drew myself on the white board. If I was willing to exaggerate my own features for the sake of education, perhaps they’d be willing to do it too. They all had a laugh at my picture on the board and got started on their own.

The students were supposed to draw their faces so that it would be recognizable to someone else. Several of the students successfully captured themselves so well they could have work as caricature artists immediately. Even when shuffled and presented to the rest of the class their portraits were immediately recognizable.  Some of the girls were put off by having to actually try to draw things like noses when I pointed out they had them on their faces but not their art. The girls thought they were living embodiments of cute anime characters or anthropomorphic animals.

The boys were put off when I pointed out that they didn’t have deep knife scars, bloody noses, horns, or fangs dripping poison. At least none that I could see anyway, although they do tend to act like little devils, so this might just be confirmation of that often bandied about theory of the teachers that have to interact with them. Some of the boys had normal pictures. I’m not a child psychologist, but the more messed up the picture of themselves was, ignoring age and art ability, the stranger the student tended to be. Is there any sort of study that would confirm that hypothesis? What does that say about my own picture above?

The game of “Guess Who?” went about as well as I could expect for a group of kids that can barely spell with a limited vocabulary. The winners actually got two people guessed correctly, which was better than their higher level camp mates. I forced them to guess till they eliminated everyone but one potential candidate, and I also wrote the notes myself for them to check their answers, which seemed to be the difference between the two classes. I’ll play it this way from now on, and if I have more time I’ll expand my worksheet to build in more vocabulary. It helped to have two sets of boards and have two groups of teams working together need to talk about their question and agree on their guess before proceeding with anything in a big class. That way more people get the tactile pleasure of playing with the game too. The self-portrait thing was only done to spend some time reviewing vocabulary, but it was so interesting I might even try it again too.