#into activity

[stormsire]

heyyyyy sugar lumps , i hope you're all doing well ? I'm clearing out my inbox today. I'll be queuing them out to pace posting on the dash. if time permits' i'll be working on getting more starters out ! i queued a few headcanons also , so do look out for those.

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]

Recipe #4: Censorship Game

I needed a way to introduce Fahrenheit 451 to my freshmen, and I wanted it to be in some sort of fun way that put them in the mindset to face the world Bradbury creates, since this is probably one of their first encounters with dystopian literature (apart from, of course, The Hunger Games). I came up with this, a mixture of a mind game I saw on Yu Yu Hakusho (inspiration comes from the strangest places!) and my own imagination, and tried it out this week. I am really happy with the results, and will probably use this again in the future (with some variations).

This game has very easy set-up, and it got the students riled up quickly, even though there were no stakes (no cookie points, no extra credit, just glory).

Censorship Game

Components:

Kinaesthetic game in teams

Reflection journal

Debrief

Objectives:

The student will be able to define "censorship"

The student will be able to experience the effects of censorship

The student will be able to apply his experience in the game to another time in his life when he has been censored

The student will be able to predict what the world of Fahrenheit 451 may look like, based on his experiences with censorship

Teacher writes the alphabet on the board (before class)

Teacher puts students into evenly-sized teams

The students select a team name based on an author they can all agree on (optional)

For every round, students send up one representative

Representatives have a certain amount of time to write down an answer on the board to a question from the teacher (30-60 seconds, depending on the question)

So long as the team has something written down, they get one point

Repeat with however many rounds desired (15 worked out to be the perfect number for me)

As rounds continue, teacher begins REMOVING letters of the alphabet; if a letter is restricted, students may not use it in their answers

Questions also become harder as game progresses

After the game, teacher gives students Journal questions (listed below); students have 15 minutes to journal about the questions

Leave 10-15 minutes at the end for a full-group debrief of the journal and activity/discussion of what students discovered in the activity/how it may apply to Fahrenheit 451

The Questions:

Note: I had 15 questions lined up because I did not know how long the game would take/how much time we'd have. I used all 15 questions, but some of them could easily be cut out, so long as the first and last questions are still the same (for effect).

What's your favorite ice cream flavor?

What's your favorite color?

What kind of pets do you have at home?

[Remove letters: A, K, Q, Z]

What's your favorite book?

Who's your favorite fictional character?

[Remove letters: G, P, U]

What's the BEST thing about English class?

What's the WORST thing about English class?

[Remove letters: B, J, L, Y]

How should a person live his or her life?

Why were Romeo and Juliet in love?

What is fate?

[Remove letters: C, O, X]

Do you believe in fate?

Why is Atticus Finch a good person?

[Remove letters: D, R, S]

Who's your favorite Disney character?

How do you feel right now?

[Remove ALL letters except for I, M, N, T]

What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

The Journal:

How did you feel at the beginning of the activity?

How did you feel near the end of the activity? Why?

Did you lie about your answers? Why?

What is "censorship"?

Describe a time in your life when YOU were censored.

Student Work:

Watching the students play this game was fascinating. While they played, I overheard comments such as,

Everyone's just copying to stay in the game!

Just write down "mint"! That's what she wants!

How can we say ANYthing like this?

They also turned the answers into a team effort where, for example, if Billy was up at the board, Billy's ENTIRE TEAM would tell him what HE thinks, just so he can succeed in the game. It resulted in a spontaneous example of "Groupthink" that gave the game more meaning than I anticipated.

After the game, my students wrote journals about their experiences, and then we had a discussion. Here are some things they said in either of those mediums:

"[At the beginning] I felt more liberated to write anything I want. I was more free to express what I really felt."

"Near the end of the activity, I was just trying to come up with ideas. It didn't matter if the answers up there were real or not"

"I felt [...] like I was being choked and strangled and the walls were closing in on me"

"I lied because that seemed to be what you wanted me to do and you're the teacher so I have to do what you tell me"

"It was like all of us/the authors on the board only had one opinion, which is impossible"

"I felt like the activity was pretty fun. [...] My favorite ice cream flavor really is mint"

"I was really pressured into writing something just to make it fit in the rules; it didn't matter whether I felt that way"

"I felt that I had no choice but to use the same answer as other groups"

"There was a lack of original ideas"

Some students were upset that answers in other languages were not accepted (to illustrate the rather nasty idea among some people that "if you're in America, you should speak English" and that other languages do not matter)

"Censorship is like being isolated or neglected"

"My mom doesn't let me read some books because she says books about death are too depressing [...] so sometimes she makes me read happy books"

One girl told a story about her aunt, a librarian whose job is to black out lines in books with sharpie if those lines are deemed inappropriate

"Each and every one of us is censored every day. Whether we know it or not"

Reflection:

What worked:

If the activity's point was to frustrate students, it was successful. The majority of my students mentioned being frustrated in some way or other when they were unable to use letters to answer as they wished.

Hard to say if it was the activity's success or just my amazing students, but we had a discussion that got to the bottom of almost all the problems with censorship after the game. A few students--some of whom have not read Fahrenheit before--connected the activity to the book already, so they will have the concept of censorship on their mind as we read.

Got full-class participation in the game, and pretty good participation during the discussion that followed (I think at least a third of the class).

I was able to stay out of the discussion most of the time, as my students spoke for themselves, or needed only an occasional "why/say more about that" from me to give a complete, meaningful answer.

The activity hit on many features of censorship--some of which even I hadn't considered--that could be starting points for discussion.

What could be improved:

Most of my students were able to make the connection between the game and censorship, but for those of them who didn't, or those that didn't pick up on the nuanced similarities, I may need to help clarify those by leading more in the discussion.

I had planned to do the discussion by simply asking students to answer the questions they had done in their journals, but I found that was not enough to get the depth I wanted. I had to invent more questions on the spot in order to help my students make connections, and some of those questions felt a little like I was leading my students by the nose. To improve this, I would have to improve the journal questions, write a separate set of discussion questions, or both.

Many of my students' definitions of "censorship" involve cursing, or not being able to confront others; they do not associate it with inability to express oneself, which is what the activity aimed at. Perhaps this activity would work as a better Into AFTER we define censorship together. It would also help my students understand the activity earlier on (as I know many of them felt clueless at the beginning and had no idea what the point was).

[greenbeanrecipes-blog]

Lord of the Balloons

"I thought I was gonna break my neck. 'Cause I fell from all the way over there to the ground."

"It's kinda like the Hunger Games. You're allowed to team up, but everyone tries to hurt each other anyway. Once your balloon is gone, you don't want anyone else to win."

"Couldn't really trust anybody."

"After people got out, no one had pride, no one had any fear. Once you're out, you have nothing to lose, so you can go all out."

Sunny: "It's human nature to exploit each other's weaknesses. I said it at the very beginning, if NO ONE pops each other's balloon, everyone gets a prize."

"Of course it was the guys that started it."

Sunny: "Even though we could have all gotten the prize, it's almost human nature to not want other people to get the same prize." (and while she explained it, someone popped a balloon in her ear; this happened twice)

"Some people tried to use their advantages over other people. Tom is more athletic than everyone in this class, so he was like the dominant Alpha male, he was able to go for everyone in class. Then there were people who thought they could delegate their way out of getting their balloons popped."

"If we didn't have government, we probably would have driven ourselves to extinction."

Jerry: "I never believed that you'd have prizes for everyone who won, so I figured, might as well outlast."

"It was fun at the beginning, but after the balloons started popping, it was like, oh crap, I'm gonna die."

Despite the safety hazard (I swear this activity should require waivers), what was MOST fascinating, from the observer's point of view, was that these 30 sophomores KNEW what Mr. T was trying to get out of them (by the frame of the novel), but soon enough they all abandoned their meta-analysis of the situation and descended into savagery. It was a brilliant way to illustrate the novel before the students even cracked the cover. For anyone considering using this activity, keep in mind:

It is a safety-hazard (things got very violent, very quickly). Mr. T said he had to cut off his worrying side in order to do this activity (after several years of desensitization)

The class I observed is particularly rowdy (it took them 10 minutes to fill up their balloons and calm down from just THAT much excitement), but they also all rather LIKE each other. I don't know if this would be more dangerous in a class with preexisting enmity

It has also been implemented by multiple teachers for multiple years at my school. I'll collect more data soon, I hope, to see how it has gone for THEM, and what kind of environment they would recommend to do this activity in, because it is a GREAT Into activity for the kind of themes the students get out of it.