Stump the Chump

I recently started teaching Catcher in the Rye in my Junior American Lit class, I can't believe how much fun I've been having. The last major work we read in class was The Crucible, and to get everybody to read this novel differently, I gave a quiz that required students to recall specific and subtle details from the book. Since this was a big change from mostly all of the other quizzes I'd given in the past, I felt like I should do something to make it up to the students or to let them have their own fun. So we played a little game called Stump the Chump.

This is something I pretty much stole from my favorite English teacher in high school. Back then we were reading Slaughterhouse Five, and my teacher told us to all write 10 "quiz" questions of our own that ask for really specific and obscure details from the novel. We then competed against other groups to stump our teacher for extra credit. I still remember asking my teacher what was the color of the owl that Billy Pilgrim walks past, and he said "Jade green" with no effort at all. I thought I had stumped him, but he nailed it.

I won't say how many hours I spent preparing for this game, but I will say that I wouldn't have been able to do it if there were credential classes this week. Anything from the first 9 chapters in the book was fair game (Exactly 66 pages). In class I put the students into 6 groups, and let the controlled madness begin. Out of about 30 questions, they only stumped me twice, and actually only one group was responsible for both of the questions I couldn't answer correctly. (To defend myself one of them was a 2 part question, and the other was just pretty vague.) All the students were engaged. Multiple students read questions for their groups, and some students even stood up to ask me the questions. There were a lot of smiles throughout the game, huddled students conferring over what question to ask next, and others flipping through the pages of the novel like madmen to find harder questions to ask me. I feel like I've really succeeded at getting a large majority of these kids to enjoy the novel.

I can't remember the first question they asked me, but I know that it wasn't too difficult. I still played it up, though, pretending that I had trouble remembering what the answer was. Students were pretty excited at first to see me struggle, but when I said the answer a lot of students seemed to be shocked that I could remember something so "trivial." The game was fun for me. I had an excuse to be extra animated in class. For students, I feel like it's always good for them to see their teacher in vulnerable situations where the teacher can possibly make a fool out of him or herself. This game was a lot of fun for me and for most of the students. If you have a crazy amount of time to prepare in one night, I definitely recommend playing something like this. I can see this game working really well if you're a full-time teacher that teaches multiple sections of the same class. By the third or fourth time, you'll really be in the zone and know every kind of question a student could ask you. I honestly cannot wait until I can teach Catcher in the Rye again to another group of kids to see how they compare to the Juniors I have right now. So much fun.