::A Geek in Korea::

One of the teachers at the school wasn’t available for an hour, so I had to teach one of my classes twice today. Since we are already dangerously close to finishing our book a month early, I couldn’t exactly move ahead at twice the pace I had set down in my syllabus. A dramatic solution was needed. I set out to find a suitable game for their level. It would, ultimately, need to be something we could do for the majority of the two hour class.

I settled on the "Odd man out" game. We have a group of words, and each of them is somehow related to each other. You had to choose the most unique reason to make one of the words "Odd man out". For example, if you had a list of words like "Bear, Tiger, Cat, Lion", you could give a reason like "A cat isn’t in a zoo", or "A bear isn’t feline". While the challenge for the students was to figure out all the words, how they related, and making a coherent reason for excluding one in English,

I wanted to turn the game into a fun challenge. The students were divided into teams. Then they had a class to look up words and put their unique reasons on paper. I took the "odd man out" student since we had an indivisible number and I’m not allowed to cut students in half. We played on a team against the rest of the students

I had played this game with adult students at a previous school. The students in this class are in elementary school, and they consistently came up with more amusing and unique answers than when I played this game in the past. Some of their answers were really awesome. For example:

One of the groups of words contained a doctor, a psychologist, a priest, and a poet.

My group suggested ,"The doctor is the only word that starts with ‘d’, so it’s the strange one".
Another group said, "Doctor, but because it’s the only one to not end in the letter ‘T’. "
The last group said "priest", because that was the only one that was allowed to marry people.

Those were totally awesome answers.

The final group of words I tossed in to see what kind of reaction it would get. I wanted to know what these students would say when they had to choose between: China , Japan, America, South Korea

Our group said, "Japan is the only island country."
Another group said, "Japan is the only country that didn’t end in the letter "A". "
Another group said, "America, because it isn’t in Asia."

Their creativity really impressed me. For homework, I gave them a harder task. They had to come up with four logically related words that each had a different way to make them "odd man out" depending on the conditions. The students really liked the game, so if they can make a good list, I’ll try to begin making another round of the game later.