Today, another report of a game I’ve used in an EFL class. This time, it’s Heart of the Deernicorn’s Night Forest.
Night Forest
Category: KOREA
Classroom RPG Resource
For those interested in RPGs in the classroom, incidentally, here’s an interesting resource full of all kinds of role-playing games.
TEFL Alice is Missing
At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises. Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
Thomas Kane’s “Learning Losses”
Since 2022—if not earlier—Thomas Kane has been banging a drum for more schooling as a remedy to what he’s calling “learning losses.” He was still banging that drum in 2023, and still is these days, too. Specifically, he argues that kids fell so far behind during in school during the pandemic that they won’t be able to catch up on their own. Kane apparently has pretty hard research showing how much this is the case, measured in “points” and also measured in weeks of school. He tends to argue that kids are so-and-so many weeks behind where kid were immediately …
A Positive Change
There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these kinds of modals a lot is when we are giving advice, since of course using the imperative is less polite and bears a higher chance of offending the recipient of the advice. So I’ve devised this “Dear Abby” type exercise. Students choose one of five letters requesting advice. The situations are all different: Someone is feeling depressed in general and burnt out from work After months …