I really don’t understand how my Economics teacher comes up with a different game to play each class. It’s not the making of the games that is so perplexing to me, it’s the fact that he correlates each game perfectly with the subject at hand. For example, I remember one game in which he asked us to go online to amazon.com and “shop” for whatever we wanted. He gave us a five-minute time limit, and told us to find five items in that set amount of time. Whoever found those five items first and still stayed under the budget of 50 dollars was supposedly the winner. After the game was completed, he asked us a variety of questions about our shopping. Based on our answers, he told us the fundamental economic principles that had to do with each of our selections. See, when he perfectly matched our shopping selections to his subject, I knew. I knew that he was the teacher that all students yearn for.
Children generally love to play games. That is a widely-known fact, as everyone at some point in their life was a kid. If students have motivation, something to play for, they will almost always try their best in any type of competition. My Economics teacher takes advantage of this fact and uses it in his classroom almost every class. Many of the topics in economics can only be expressed through hands-on experience and activities. When my teacher runs a game in the classroom, he makes sure that the students are getting that real-world experience, so that they know the exact feelings and consequences of the subject being used in the outside world. Our class average on our test was a 96%.
No surprise there.
Another game that really helped me connect to the subject at hand was a game that involved the students becoming fake lawyers. Now, this game lasted a longer period of time, about two weeks, but it was a continuous thing that students were excited about. Our Civics teacher basically ran us through the process of how to become a lawyer. Obviously, many of the knowledge and steps were cut out from this game, because we were learning at an eighth-grade level, but our teacher literally took the time to provide a mock court-case for us and lead us through the process of becoming a lawyer.
If games connect to the subject at hand in the right way, students will be able to grasp everything that is taught in the classroom. My friends and I always look forward to my Economics teacher’s class, because we know that we’ll have fun and learn at the same time, a combination that is rarely used in the classroom but is incredibly effective with both students and teachers. Even though Economics can be a hard subject to work with (at least in my experience), with the right techniques, students can treat it like a fun sports game, or an activity that intrigues them. This doesn’t just apply to economics, it applies to all of the subjects being taught in school. Teaching can be rather simple to get across, if a teacher just uses the techniques that engage students, like games in the classroom. If students experience something that is new, then the teacher will see something new in their students.
Nihar,
ReplyDeleteI really like this . . . so powerful:
"Teaching can be rather simple to get across, if a teacher just uses the techniques that engage students, like games in the classroom. If students experience something that is new, then the teacher will see something new in their students."