Primary Kids are Terrible Cheaters

Because the teachers’ retreat consumed my weekend, I took the easy way out in preparing this week’s lesson and fell back on playing Concentration again. I don’t really like playing games with the kids, though. They get out of control over the slightest bit of fun, which would explain why their Chinese teachers are so by-the-books. Sometimes, we hardly get to play at all; most of class is spent waiting for them to be quiet before we can continue.

Playing games like this also brings out the students’ inner cheater. Let’s not kid ourselves; children are conniving, they just aren’t very good at it yet. They haven’t learned how to be successfully inconspicuous. So during the game, I would catch a lot of them jotting down where the pictures were so they could take the “memory” out of Memory. But calling them on their trickery and taking their cheat sheets away didn’t stop them from trying again. They just turned to scribbling notes on their desk. The only thing I could do to get them to stop was to confiscate their pencils.

I’ve run into this problem before. Years ago, as an ILP teacher, I remember lecturing my students about how cheating wasn’t fair after a game went horribly awry. More recently, the last lesson I did with the kids at World was Go Fish. It started out well enough, but I eventually had to end the game early to introduce two new and very important words: cheat and cheater. Those kids were like cheating addicts. They couldn’t stop, and the more someone cheated them, the more they had to cheat others in return. It’s the Golden Rule hard at work.

20 November 2008 | Teaching | Comments | Home
tags: class activities, manners

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