The Jones' Korean Adventure

After graduating from University, I often wondered if my Psychology degree would ever come in handy...would my knowledge of the human mind ever be useful? Today I found out just what could be accomplished by a person with a major in "the study of the mind".

I have recently introduced the idea of a "Spelling Test" to my youngest class. Their spelling is absolutely atrocious, and I thought it would be beneficial to work on it.

Today I let the kids know that I would be giving them their second list of ten words, and that they needed to study the words for a test tomorrow. That did NOT go over well!! The whining and the "teacher, teacher - no study" started almost immediately. The negative response from the kids would have made any by-passer think that I was the most hated teacher in the world! Then the bartering began: "Teacher, 5 word", "Teacher only 1 word", "Ten word, no", and on and on it went in broken English.

So, I pulled back into my reservoir of "people skills", put on my best smile, and said, "I will let you choose. We can do 100 words, OR we can do 10". A few blank stares, a few looks of "what is she talking about?". I said, "Ok, who would rather have 100 words?"...to which one kid slowly raised his hand. Then I said, "Who would rather have 10 words?"...one other kid raised his hand to that. "I guess 100 words is what we'll do...since it's a tie", I said. "On second thought, lets raise our hands one more time". "Who would rather have 100 words?"...no hands raised. "Who would like to have 10 words?"...every hand raised.

I made a big show of humming and hawwing, and thinking, and then announced - "We will have only 10 words tomorrow". The cheering in the class was incredibly loud! The kids were all leaning forward, looking at me as if I was the best teacher they had ever had. I wrote the words on the board, and they happily copied them into their notebooks.

Thank goodness they're too young to know that they had just cheered for the exact same thing they had whined about 2 minutes earlier - how good is that?