Today I did something that most native teachers (the given name of english-speaking teachers in Korea) will do at some point in their stay: attempted a day of Jeopardy. I mean why not? It's competitive, It's a perfect vehicle for covering a whole semester of class, and it's mellow enough that it doesn't seem like average classroom drudgery. Was it a good idea? I say yes. Did it follow through? Not really.
I started the game with teams picked at random (count off! 1-2-1-2... we've all been there). That quickly fizzled because the two geniuses on either team basically went head to head, while everyone else tore out the pages of their text books to throw at each other. My co-teacher had the seemingly brilliant idea of splitting the teams up by gender. I liked it. Perhaps a little gender solidarity might make more cohesive teams, I thought. Wrong.
All that solidarity did was put more pressure on the shoulders of either boy/girl genius. What happened? Tears happened. I had created an atmosphere where any wrong answer was seemed to be not only a let down to the team, but a letdown to the gender. By the end of the day we saw four cases of legitimate head-in-hands crying because one person or the other misspelled "climb." I felt like an asshole.
A word to the wise: don't ever underestimate the pride of 11-year old Koreans.
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