Classroom Activities Part VI/VII: The Body and Illness

For now, this will be the last of my blogs on lessons unless I have another lesson I find worth sharing with you. I combined these two into a single blog, despite the lessons being a week apart, because they are pretty inseparable.

Like clothing, the body is another part of learning language that we often gloss over without much consideration. Everyone acknowledges that it’s important to learn about the body, but there is relatively little time dedicated to such topics as body parts, illness, and health in most textbooks or curriculum. In fact, when I was having some illness problems related to food poisoning here, I had to look up some French vocabulary for some pretty basic doctor-related things because I realized how much I had neglected learning about the body and health in my French studies, mostly because I knew those units were incredibly short.

Anyways, the first lesson was an introduction to the body. My seconde students had no idea what anything was called. My première students, who had done a unit on the body that year, also had a very limited knowledge of the body. And my terminal students did generally well to the point that after drawing my disproportionate body that looked more like and ape than man and my decently drawn face with sufficiently drawn facial features, I had them identify as many body parts as they could while also giving them more terms like “shin, calf, or arm pit”.

As you can imagine, my drawing of the human body wasn’t perfect, but it did its job and got progressively better as I drew it over and over again (19 times in total). I gave all the vocabulary: head, neck, shoulders, back, throat, elbow, wrist, hand, fingers, arm, chest, stomach, waist, hips, thigh, leg, knee, foot, toes, heel, eyes, ears, nose, forehead, chin, teeth, mouth, lips, tongue, cheeks, etc. Once we went over this vocabulary, we stood up and sang that classic banger of a song, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” After a chorus of laughter and eyerolls from some of the more self-conscious students who think they’re too good to sing and dance, I had them sit down and pull out sheets of paper on which they drew a 5x5 graph with the center square crossed out because it, my friend, was time for some body bingo.

I hate bingo. I absolutely hate it. And it's not because I accidentally spelled it "B-I-N-G-O" one time. Old people love bingo, and college students love bingo. But I don’t. In college, universities put on bingo games that draw crowds of hundreds (not exaggerating) of students with dozens of prizes ranging in value from $25 to several hundred. A friend of a friend of mine in college won a TV as the grand prize. Thus, people incorrectly believe that bingo night is fun and fallibly overvalue their time there.

I’m an economist. I think in terms of opportunity costs, the costs associate with choosing one course of action over another. And when we consider opportunity costs, we shouldn’t compare only the utility benefit of different actions, but also the disutility of the action, those things we dislike, which actually weigh more heavily than the things we do like. Going to bingo, logically and rationally, makes no sense because the opportunity costs are high with little expectation of return. Put it this way, your chances of winning bingo are slim, at best. The average value of a prize is $30-$40. If bingo is 3-hours long, and you win a prize worth $30, then you have effectively only earned, in monetary value, $10 an hour, which few people would choose to work for. That being said, you could work a job for 3-hours and still come to the same monetary opportunity cost, although this is only taking into account dollar value.

“Oh but Nathaniel, what about the utility you gain from being with your friends and being social? Isn’t that a benefit?”

No. No it is not. Bingo night, in no shape or form is a social event. In fact, it is entirely an antisocial event that pits people against each other. You are constantly looking at a board, generating an ungodly amount of stress and anxiety, and have no time to socialize with the friends you went with because everyone is doing the same thing, plus they’re also your competitors. Game theory says you shouldn’t have a single feeling of attachment to another human in that room because they all pose themselves as threats and barriers between you and your goal, to get bingo and earn an overvalued prize. Bingo is a zero-sum game where if someone else wins, you lose; period. When someone else inevitably yells, “bingo!” your natural response is anger, frustration, disappointment, and jealousy. My conjecture is that these things actually produce disutility as they are counterproductive to human fellowship and undesirable emotions. Instead, I’d rather go out or watch a movie. I may not stand to gain anything and may actually spend money, but the time I spend on the disutility of bingo night is far greater, even in behavioral terms, than the utility of actually being social and having a good time doing, literally, anything else short of causing oneself harm.

Bingo, however, does have quite a lot of utility as a teaching tool. After explaining the rules of bingo in English and French a million times, my students finally write in their own bingo boards various body parts that are already on the board. It’s good because the students have to produce the body parts and write them. Afterwards, we play bingo where I call out random body parts until someone wins. It’s a good listening activity, too. I keep having them make new boards and play again and again until class is over. But this lesson is only to set myself up for the next lesson, things that go wrong with the body.

The next lesson starts with a review of the body parts because it was inevitable that none of the students practiced the vocabulary like I requested. Afterwards, we run through various things that can go wrong with the body: cold, fever, cough, headache, backache, toothache, ear infection, allergies, sneezing, cut, scrape, bleeding, broke something, sore something, etc.

I had to also explain that it’s not quite like the French way of saying something. For example, if you say, “j’ai cassé mon bras,” which literally translates as, “I broke my arm,” you are implying that you, yourself, deliberately broke your arm. Instead, you have to say, “je me suis cassé le bras,” which directly translates as, “I, the arm at me, am broken.” It means, “I broke my arm,” but in the sense that it was an accident that happened to you and that you did not intentionally break your own arm. It has to do with the difference between committing an action and the change of a state of being, which, if you remember from my second blog about Malagasy and language, Indo-European language are obsessed with differentiating the two, but in this case, English doesn’t really bother getting into specifics about that kind of stuff because English is practical. For example, if you say, “j’ai tombé le crayon,” which is, “I fell the pencil,” it means that you are holding the pencil and lowering it down with your hand, presumably. Instead, you have to said, “j’ai fait tomber le crayon,” which directly is, “I did cause the pencil to fall.” This is how the French, and Spanish for that matter, express dropping a pencil. Most of the time, however, you just say, “le crayon est tombé,” which is, “the pencil fell,” thereby exempting yourself of all responsibility of having dropped the pencil. Interesting, huh?

After we get all these new vocab words in order, we are set, more or less, to play a bunch of rounds of Mr. BALD says, which is the same as Simon Says, but just with yours truly’s name instead. Explaining the rules of Simon Says was also a nightmare. All the students have to stand up and act out what I say.

“Mr. BALD says I have a broken leg.”

“Mr. BALD says I have a sore throat.”

“Mr. BALD says I have cold.”

“Mr. BALD says I have a cut on my hand.”

“Mr. BALD says my knee is bleeding because I have a scrape on my knee.”

Etc.

The game could get competitive, and rarely did I not say, “Mr. BALD says,” because half the struggle for my students was remembering where the body parts were. I would say, “sore knee,” and half the students would start rubbing the back of their necks because “neck” and “knee” sound the same to them, as do “waist” and “wrist”. So we played this game over and over again until we ran out of time. Had I thought of it earlier, I would have brought prizes for my students, like little candies. It's a fact that rewards for successfully completing objectives is an effective teaching strategy for kids and teens.

And there you have it. Those are what I believe were the most successful lessons I had in the classroom. Sometimes my lessons just weren’t great. I had one about the past simple tense and American history that completely flopped. I only taught it one day and changed my lessons for the rest of the week. Another time I had them look at a menu and play sort of “Go-Fish” game. It was successful for the most part, but I think it could have gone better. I’m no perfect teacher. And I make plenty of mistakes. Nonetheless, I choose to learn from those mistakes and try new approaches given my experience and the experience of other teachers. No one lesson works for all classes, ages, or levels. I constantly have to change the difficulty of some lessons, whether that’s increasing or decreasing. As a teacher, you have to read the room and know your students, which can be the most difficult part of preparing a lesson if you over- or underestimate their level and previous knowledge. Overall, it has been an enlightening experience being in a foreign classroom, and it makes me wonder how I would fare in an American classroom where my natural sass and side comments are actually understood. Anyways, the school year draws to a close which means I won’t be in the normal classroom anymore. Rather, I’ll be touring the country on short vacations and visiting English clubs and maybe helping some teacher training sessions. Regardless, I will keep you updated with anything fun or interesting that goes on.

And as always, know that you are in my prayers each morning, and I genuinely mean that. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.