STATION 2: SIMULATION

March, 27th - STATION 2

This station deals with some of the characters from the short stories by Roald Dahl we had to read before coming to class: Mrs. and Mr. Bixby from "Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat" and Mary Maloney from "Lamb to the Slaughter". It is worth pointing out that all the activities of this station not only makes the students reflect on their readings but they also deal with some moral values such as prejudices against people and also with human rights.

 



This is the case of the simulation in the first activity, for example: students have to choose seven people from a list of canditates, they have to pick up the people they want to be saved and leave the rest behind. It is a huge responsability for us to decide who decide who will live and who will die, don't you think? People are always influenced by their religious beliefs, sexual or racial prejudices and, therefore, their choice is going to be clearly based on them. There will be many different results after doing this activity because, although we live in the same society and we may share the majority of the ideas, each individual has his/her own beliefs and his/her own way of interpreting reality.

As a team, these are the people we chose and some of the arguments of our choice:

• William Patween. Although he is old and he has cancer and it is sure that he is going to die soon, he is an indigenous tribe leader who knows the island pretty well. So, he is the only one who can teach and explain the rest of the group how to survive in the island in the Pacific.


• Father Eugenio. Although he is a priest and he is not going to have descendants. He knows the South Pacific and is an expert on agriculture and growing is a vital knowledge in order to survive in a desert island. Being priest, he may also act as a sort of diplomat in the island.


• Robert Sisulu. We take him because he is an experienced hunter and his hunting knowledge will be very helpful in order to feed people in the deserted island.


• Kris McDonnell. The fact that she is a police officer and she carries a gun may be helpful in order to survive in the island, but we mainly take her because she is 3 months pregnant.


• Mary Maloney. Although her story is quite impressing and we kind of understand her reaction, we basically take her because she is pregnant. As she is a housewife, she can be in charge of cooking and feeding the whole group.


• Dr. Hammed Bedrouni. As we are taking pregnant women, we need a doctor to help them give birth. We don’t care if he is Muslim or not, but the role of the doctor is almost the most important when we think in terms of surviving.


• John McDonnell. He is a firefighter. We need strong people in order to built shelters but we also need fertile men in order to reproduce the species.

We tried to be as objective as posible but, sometimes, our preconceived ideas came to the surface of our decision. However, our choice was not only based on the prejudices of the people of the team but also on the importance of the role each person would fulfill in the deserted island: people from different religions, races and of different sexual orientation are forced to cohabite in our deserted island!

 

Making a Glogster or not?

The idea of making a glogster is a good one. It is a visual way of working with students and I really believe that it is a useful tool to introduce new vocabulary and new topics through funny images, trendy videos and songs, etc. Thinking about the role of the teacher, glogster becomes a useful tool in order to activate the previous knowledge of the students and to make them feel engaged in the activity almost without realising.

This is the one our team proposed:

http://www.glogster.com/group2ucv/desert-island/g-6ks4b6irldlv11f9edk01a0

 

This glogster is to be used as a pre-teaching activity: the survival topic is introduced through videos, songs and questions. Thus, the students are allowed to thinkg about the positive and the negative aspects of being trapped in a deserted island or they can express their feelings, while they learn vocabulary related to the topic almost without realising. However, I strongly believe that this glogster in particular can also be used as a post-teaching activity if you are dealing with the grammatical structures of the second conditional because being trapped in a deseted island is a hypothetical situation.

Now thinking about the role of the students, glosters can also be a different way of making presentations. It is more visual and more up-to-date than Powerpoint presentations. However, the best point of it is that, as there is not much text, students won't be reading the whole presentation. They will be expressing themselves, with their own words. Making a glosgster is also a way of fostering their creativy because students are free to compile the information however they want.

 

What about writing a postcard?

The idea of making a postcard or a picture of the island is also attractive. I had never thought about it before and I didn't even heard about these webpages. I think that this can be a perfect teaching activity because it lets the students put into practice the vocabulary of the topic and the grammatical structures reviwed in class but, at the same time, they are allowed to be creative.

This is the one we propose:

 

 

 

 

 

The internet is plenty of resources that can help teachers working with appealing activities for teenager students. Related to the topic of survival, the webpage www.freerice.com provides a huge quantity of vocabulary realted to several topic: human anatomy, geography (flags of the world, world capitals, country identification and world landmarks), the identification of famous artwork, and literature (classic and popular books). However, the most important thing of this learning tool is that it is a free online game that allows players to donate rice to fight world hunger while learning though, multiple-choice games: students donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for each of their correct answers. They are not only learning English but also important values and human rights because, eventually, we are educating and helping people grow. Teachers have also a social role, they are teaching students to be part of our society.

 

 

Teaching values is also important and the simulation arised at the beginning of the station is really useful to make students realise to what extent we are influenced by prejudices when judging other people (sexual inclination, race, religious beliefs, etc) and the importance of the human rights, that is, of the fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because he or she is a human being.