Scrabbled

Quite a few of my Year 10 class were out gallivanting this morning on various outings, so I decided, in an act of blatant loose cannonness (canoninity?) to throw out the detailed lesson plan I hadn't written because I am hacked off with having to write detailed lesson plans, and decided to do what we did occasionally in the old days which was commonly known as 'winging it.' My only proviso, I told the group when I told them of my avant guard plan for the hour, was that every activity we winged must have a connection to the novel 'Of Mice and Men' because that is what we have been studying for the last 8 weeks.

So, I had a group of three girlies out in the corridor doing a Jeremy Kyle-style 'Curley's wife-meets-her-horrid-mother-who-ruined-her-dreams-of-being-a-movie-star' and has it out with her, spitting and swearing in a mock TV extravaganza.

And another group of five girlies making a board game to teach younger students about the characters, plot, setting and themes of the novel, which produced the most spectacularly enormous cardboard dice I have ever seen in the almost 15 years I've been involved in education.

And then there were a couple of lads who constructed a rather fetching 3-D pictorial representation of the opening scene in the novel complete with a river, a pond and a lovely sunset coming down over the Galiban mountains. They even added some relevant quotations, but only after I had threatened them.

And finally, there was a boys versus girls Scrabble game where not only did they have to come up with words that actually existed, they had to spell them correctly AND link them to the novel. One of the lads tried to convince me that the heron at the end of the novel that eats the water snake thus foreshadowing the death of Lennie, was, in fact, a budgie, but I wasn't letting him get away with that one, especially as I was winning at the time.

Anyway, when it became clear I was likely to win the game of Scrabble, I was voted off the girl's team by the boys and another student took my place. I went off to sulk in the corridor with the Jeremy Kyle girls, but came back just in time to see the spectacular fracas between Chloe and Fraser.

 It is my belief that Chloe and Fraser are secretly in love, but outwardly they are always  niggling and sniping at each other, and thus it had been during the Scrabble game. Until, that is, Chloe decided to end it all by flinging the board, tiles and all, across the table with the anguished shout of 'You are such an IMBECILE!' before picking up her enormous and flamboyant bag and flouncing to the opposite side of the classroom for a mammoth sulking session.

I was so proud of her! They are a bottom set group...and she used the word 'imbecile' in exactly the right context!

My job is done.