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
Tag: TEFL
Show Me Your Work
This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them.
Gamify It #1: Coureurs des Bois/Voyageurs
This post is just an idea for a mass-game type exercise for a large EFL camp, riffing on Canadian history and specifically the fur trade.
Mark Majcher’s Twenty Four Game Poems as a TEFL Resource
I recently picked up Mark Majcher‘s book Twenty Four Game Poems on Bundle of Holding (which is basically the Tabletop RPG gamer’s equivalent of Humble Bundle). I actually bought the bundle mainly for this book, because it intrigued me so profoundly, and I have to say, I’m glad I did. A “game poem” is basically just a short, simple pick-up game of some kind, for which the rules and mechanics are simple, and the game is focused on a single, straightforward idea, theme, or mini-arc. For example, players might adopt the role of a bird flying around to some purpose, and narrate their flight’s beginning, middle, …
Bizarre Stuff Korean Parents Say To English Tutors (ie. Us)
The following is a translation of a post my wife, Mrs. Jiwaku, made to Facebook. It was just too priceless not to translate and share in English. A word about the contents of the list: These aren’t things that one mom once said: they’re things we’ve heard time and again, and which, when we hear them, always cause us to flinch a little… to the complete bafflement of the people–mostly moms–saying them. So, no, we’re not cherry-picking the really crazy stuff… all the below is from the solidly average, not-extreme-by-general-standards parents. (Yes, mostly moms, because that’s who mostly manages the day-to-day stuff related to their …
TEFL RPGing Aplenty
So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through… Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed up with a goblin and a dragon to beat his nemesis, then teamed up with a mysterious capoerista girl (yes, capoeira has made its way into the game) and the goblin village’s witch to take on the dragon …
“New”: Course Website
I’m still busy sorting out the CPU minutes/spammer problems on my website, though I’m getting closer by the day to sorting it all out. Part of sorting it out has involved converting a bunch of old installations of WordPress that I’d set up for students into static html webpages, so that I could delete the WordPress installations, which is time consuming and, if I didn’t want to keep the blogs for the sheer point of keeping them up–later I can say, “See, I hosted blogs for my students!”–then I would have just deleted them. But, well… I didn’t. All that …
Youngmin and the Magic World
Attention conservation notice: This post will mainly interest those who are curious about my experiences using RPGing in language teaching as a method of generation motivation, focus, and interest in language learning (a topic I discussed in a recent essay of mine published in the WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book).
Interview by Tate
I only vaguely remember answering these questions, for good reason: Tate’s ESL Travel Chronicle interviewed me last year but I must have missed when the interview was posted. Here it is, for the curious. (Funny reading this, now that I’m no longer in Korea.) Since it’s mainly about my life in Korea, and not about my writing, I’m just posting it to the blog, and not to the interviews section of this… wait, that’s gone missing. Er… well, anyway.
Lesson Plan: The Caper!
Back when I first came to Korea, there was a lesson I created on the spur of the moment, after observing how little security there seemed to be on the little minivans that drove around in Iksan putting money into bank machines. (I had such fun talking over strategies for robbing one of these vans with a group of expats that I thought I’d see how my students fared.) Over the years, the exercise has shifted and changed slightly. Finally, this past year, after a brush with Jason Morningstar’s wonderful Fiasco RPG, I expanded it a little to include an …