World Trade Game take 2

I have played the World Trade Game before and you can see the instructions in an earlier post.

This time I did it as another of the afternoon communication session with the group of German teachers. Again, this was met with mixed feelings. Some of the teachers were very happy and saw the potential for the game with their students. As this was what they had been asking for all week I decided to make the discussion section at the end of the game about the different applications of the game for their students. I thought this worked really well, some of the teachers saw it as an application for social sciences, others an exercise in trade and economics and some even as an engineering project. In this respect I was very happy with the way the afternoon turned out. Other teachers however, felt that it was a silly game for children. You win some, you lose some.

Here is how the game turned out.

Mozambique went for the jugular from the start. They seemed to get it immediately and went after scissors and were very reluctant to relinquish any paper. Some very shrewd business being done. They also made great use of their extra man power. So much so that when they had used all their paper they just sat back and watched the rest of the world work. Although they did eventually lose a team member as the world bank (one of the teachers who specialises in economics) got so sick of being bullied by America that she resigned so one of the Mozambique team offered to step up to the task. It didn't do them much damage though.

India went a bit renegade and although there were expressly told that all items must be cut with a pair of scissors they seemed to manage the whole production process without them. Although I did have to confiscate a swiss army knife from their table. Full credit to them for making their products with out scissors and still getting them past the scrutiny of the world bank!

Brazil on the other hand, even with scissors lacked any kind of finesse of production.

Japan and the USA both struggled with having only 2 team members and no paper. They seemed to be relying on the belief that there was going to be some economic calculation that led them to get extra points at the end. Also they were either unwilling to trade scissors for paper or the other countries simply got the better of them. America also seemed to think the other countries were picking on them, could it be true??

Interestingly none of the countries used the money that they were given to trade with. Although Japan had some very nice products which in our game meant very little but did lead into one of the discussions about how to develop the game for different areas of study. Perhaps by allowing higher quality good to be sold at a higher price.

Finally, it was suggested that Mozambique should not have been allowed to be the world bank and were accused of creative accounting by America. However we worked out that Americans 'have big shoulders' and were walking past the bank rubbing off numbers.... deliberate or not we will never know but the winners stood out from the start and I was assured that the maths was accurate!

Mozambique coming in far ahead of the rest of the world and despite their big shoulders America came in bottom of the pile.

German Culture, British Culture

I have taught groups of German students on vocational work placement programmes before. This group however were slightly different, they were the teachers not the students. This presented a different set of challenges, the biggest of which being them knowing exactly what they wanted and not being afraid to say it. This in itself was possibly a lesson in culture conflict but that is another story. In an attempt to react to the needs and wants of the 'students' (not all of which were reasonable) I did a session on British culture. In the course outline for the week it was intended to be a book exercise (language leader upper-intermediate chapter 11) but the only activity from the book I used in the end was the reading activity on culture shock.

We started by discussing what culture is and what makes it then moved on to talk about outside opinions of British Culture. We ended up with a list of stereotypes on the board and were then able to discuss which ones of them were true and which were not.

While this may seem to be somewhat frivolous it did have a serious point. It had become clear over the course of the week that these teachers wanted to take something back to their students in Germany, students who were potentially coming to England on a similar trip. The topic of politeness led on to a later lesson on how to talk to people in different situations while this board developed into a list of things which, as a teacher, they could tell their students before their first trip to the UK.

This is what they came up with.

Of course this is only one groups advice but there are some very valid points made, traffic and smiling being two of the key points. Having lived in Europe I know that smiling at people tends to make people look at you like a lunatic but in England a smile goes a very long way.

I am trying very hard here not to give the impression that I was making this up as I was going along, but lets face it we all know I was. As a teacher I am generally terrified of walking into a classroom without a step by step plan... so of course I did have one. Unfortunately with this group of students I knew that they were not going to like it. So instead of 'making it up' and prefer to call it thinking on my feet. A skill I think is very necessary as a teacher and the results of the lesson were good and I would do it again. If I was to repeat this I would add a lot more structure, probably some office language (depending on the students) and I would also keep the reading on culture shock as I think it was a good lead in to the advice exercise. Depending on the level of students you could also add in some grammar, modal verbs are a good one with culture, or vocabulary. In general this lesson was a reaction to a bad situation but I think that the students got something from it which they wanted and at the end of the day that was the point. I am still not an advocate of seat of the pants teaching but in this case there was definitely a good outcome which I could use again.