Memory

Start of fourth marking period I deviated a bit from the curriculum to teach homonyms, words that sound the same but have different meanings, i.e. hair and hare.

Big. Mistake.

When I asked for examples of homonyms, I got everything from thin and tin (Liberians pronounce th like t), house and horse, cycle and circle, pan and pen, and faith and fate (again because of the th). Now when I say these words they sound completely different. But in my students’ defense, when they say them they do sort of sound similar. Problem being their accents and the funny way they say things (read: thin said as tin, morning said as money with a long o, hand like han because they drop the d). A little lazy yes, and makes for a damn difficult time teaching homonyms. By the end of the week, I was wishing I had never started the topic in the first place, the same reaction I had when I tried teaching clauses.

Come Friday I was done. No more homonyms please. So I did the next best thing to canceling classes completely: played a game.

For Friday’s game I dipped into the farthest reaches of my brain and tooled through my archived catalogue of childhood games. What did I come up with? Memory, perhaps my brother’s most favorite game when he was young. We had a couple different versions of Memory, the only one I remember of which had different professions on each. Match the nurse with the nurse! The police officer with the police officer! (Keep in mind it was a Disney version, so the nurse was Minnie and the policeman was Goofy.)

I wrote pairs of homonyms on 8x11 pieces of copy paper and I taped these to the board in a 5x6 grid to create a life-size version of the game. Then I explained the rules. Which immediately went in one ear and out the other. I’m a big believer in sink or swim though, so I split the class into two teams and we just started playing. To my surprise not only did they understand it, they enjoyed it. Granted they were more concerned with who won than the material, but for me it didn’t matter. There are not many days when I feel like an awesome teacher, and the majority of the time my lessons are abysmal failures. That being said, Friday I felt like an awesome teacher. What an incredible feeling to show students that school doesn’t have to be all note-taking and rote memorization. It can be fun. It can involve games. And sometimes, just once in awhile, maybe the students will actually want to come to school.