Let Students Say Anything to Prove Their Understanding

 WHEN CAN YOU SAY ANYTHING?    

     After Thanksgiving dinner, I convinced eight of my female relatives to sit down to a game of SAY ANYTHING by NORTH STAR GAMES.  The ages ranged from 16-95.  The game took minutes to teach, and when the ladies were finished with the first game, they all wanted to play again.  SAY ANYTHING is a party game that offers quick access to fun and laughter, but I also think that it has the potential to offer great insight into a student’s understanding. 

     I will use it in my rhetoric course and my English course.

WHY?

     Here is how you play:

• A player reads a question off of a card.
• Other players write down the answer that they think the READER will choose as the best.
• The reader secretly picks a favorite.
• The players all have two chips with which to indicate which answer they think the reader will choose.
• The reader reveals his choice.
• Scores are recorded.
• The next player becomes the reader.

HOW I WILL USE IT IN SCHOOL?

     In rhetoric, special emphasis will be put on the players lobbying for their own answers by using rhetorical techniques and concepts that the class has covered.

     In English, students will answer questions in the manner that they believe a prescribed character that they have studied would  answer.  Students will be expected to defend those answers based on their knowledge of the character they are portraying.

DISCUSSION WILL ENSUE…

when the reader (or teacher) does not think that a character would not respond in a way presented by a player.  This will provide great review fodder and an opportunity to talk about how authors reveal characters’ personalities.

KIDS USE PDQ PRETTY DARN QUICKLY

      

      If you are not a gamer,  the three letters PDQ probably refer to the phrase pretty darn quickly as in this sentence:  Jimmy, you better get over here and do your chores pretty darn quickly.  However,  if you have any interest in gaming and game design, you probably know that PDQ is a game system created by Chad Underkoffler and that it stands for Prose Descriptive Qualities. As one coming back to roleplaying games after a number of years, I was delighted to find the rules so easy to read. Applications for the classroom immediately came to mind, but before I used the system in class, I played it with my children and my school gaming club, and after feeling comfortable with it, I enjoyed using PDQ to have students respond to a reading of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.     

        When I cover this work of literature I like to emphasize how it points out the dark underbelly of small town life–think Twin Peaks– and how its use of epitaphs gives us insight into what the real motivations were in these dead characters’ lives.  Through poetic tombstomes, characters get to speak from the dead.  It’s a great opportunity to discuss empathy and patience. Oftentimes, the reader learns that an unlikable character has very good reasons for not being Mister Nice Guy or Little Lassy Likey.  After we read and reflect upon the literature, we create our own small town and some of its inhabitants.  This year we populated a place we called Punkinville.  This is not much of a creative stretch; our school is in a tiny,  one-stoplight town.       

        I have used town creation and population as a culminating activity before I knew about PDQ, but this year I didn’t want the end product to just be little, prose character sketches.  I wanted these characters to interact, and having characters interact is what roleplaying games do.  I knew that PDQ would be a simple way to do this with students unfamiliar with tabletop RPGs.  The first step, of course, was to explain the system.  PDQ is called prose descriptive qualities because characters’ traits are written as words or short phrases.  For instance, a testy teacher might have the following qualities: fork-tongued, spasms of sarcasm, or temper tantrum.  This is a worthwhile activity when you are making up an original character, but it does educational double-duty when a student is writing qualities for an existing character.  The system inherently asks for an understanding of the character, for reading comprehension.  Misreading becomes very easy to catch.  If a student is using PDQ to stat out Frankenstein’s monster and the qualities listed include handsome and content, it is obvious that the student should take another look at the text.         

       Once the student has composed qualities that are based on a good reading of the text, numbers get into the mix.  This allows for some fine tuning in regard to characterization. The PDQ master chart is fairly simple to understand.  I have cut it from the official free rules that you can get to from the first hyperlink in this post. Take a look at it with the knowledge that the students will have already written their descriptive words and phrases for their characters.          

I project the chart onto the wall while we play. This is cut and pasted from the free PDQ rules linked to earlier.

       Students assign each of their character’s qualities one of the numbers that are listed in the Modifier to 2D6 column.  This helps express how good, average, or bad the character’s qualities are.  It also provides a great bridge to discussion.  I often ask the students why they have ranked a character a certain way, and they are expected to provide an answer that shows an understanding of the text.  Once this is done, characters are ready to interact.  In class, it is assumed that a student will attempt to make their character act in congruence with his personality as revealed in the piece of literature.  If he doesn’t, it is more fodder for discussion.  Reflection is an important part of the process.       

     Of course,  at some point a character will need to overcome some sort of challenge.  A character might need to woo a woman or fight a rabid, wild dog or shoot a winning a basket or convince his church that poaching is okay in his poor community.  This is when the Target Number column gets some play.  As the teacher, I usually decide how difficult the particular task would be for the character and assign a target difficulty number that I take from the far right column.  The student rolls two six-sided dice and adds or subtracts his character’s modifier to see if the attempt was successful.  Simple.  And the story moves along.  If I keep the plot moving along, students are really engaged.       

  There are also rules for taking damage to a character, but I did not use them my first time around.  If I would have used PDQ several times in class, I would have been able to tap all of its interesting aspects, many of which are not mentioned here.  I believe I will try to do this this year.   School starts this month.  I better get planning PDQ…pretty darn quickly.