I’ve told all my students we will never play Hangman in my class anymore. Since every single lazy teacher ever plays the occasional game of Hangman in their classes to kill that last five minutes of class before the bell rings, the students sometimes ask to play. No more. I’ve made it my goal to never play Hangman again in class.
To be honest, playing Hangman as an educational game is a complete waste of time. In large classes, there are always non-participants that don’t work on figuring out the word and simply guess a random letter. Other students try, but usually are just trying to guess letters without thinking about phonics or words they know. The amount of time spent with one letter left in the word guessing the same letters is just as great as when the entire word is unknown The last time I played the game with a class, a student wasted all the classes turns trying to spell his English name with his choices.
It’s also a terrible and cruel image.
Whenever any of my students say, "Teacher, please, Hangman!" I give them a a look of surprise and disappointment.
"Do you have a rope?" I will respond. The students will get a confused look on their face.
"No. Why?"
"Well we can’t hang anyone without a rope now can we? Does anyone have a long scarf? It might work, but we don’t have anything to hang it from. Looks like we can’t play Hangman today. Let’s talk in English instead."
"TEACHER! HANGMAN! PLEASE."
This is where my keen skills of distraction usually work the avoid their complaints. I’ve broken quite a few classes of the habit of asking for Hangman after I give students homework.
Today we had an extra short lesson. The class had prepared several items as gifts for my birthday, including candy and a paper "bouquet". Since they had been the only students to remember their teacher’s birthday, I let them play a game. This game is a variation of Hangman, where I choose a word and reveal the number of letters in it by writing it on the board. Then, students have to guess words of the same length. I tell the students if their word contains the same letters mine does. If a letter is in the same position as it is in my word, I write it in the place where they are in the word in a box called "My Word". The letters that are in the student’s word but not my own are written in a space called "In My Word". The students need to use the process of elimination to figure out words to guess that contain new letters not in previous guesses, and can also look at the position of letters to try to guess my word. There is a limit of 10 or so guesses before the student must figure out my word or lose.
My main problem with Hangman was simply guessing a letter without paying attention wasn’t punished. Students playing this new game had to at least speak English, think about words, letter placement, and smartly choose words. If they picked words with repeating letters, they got in trouble with their friends. It was a much different sort of class game than Hangman. I’ve played it with classes at other schools whole thought it was entirely too confusing. I think now I’ve found a way to easily present the material so that everyone in the class can understand how to play.
The best thing is that by changing the length of words, the game forces students to learn better words, as well as keeping the game fresh. The students improved the amount of guesses they needed about 50% each time they played. By adding to the length of the word in the game, they had to think of new words to guess, since the words they were using before no longer worked. While I’ll still avoid playing games and doing Hangman in classes, if I happen to fall short, this will be my new game of choice.
