Listening 42 – Listen for specific words

I once volunteered to give martial arts classes to kids at a school in a poor neighborhood. I had about twenty students ages six to nine, and I know kids that age are rambunctious, but these kids were just completely out of control. If I looked away for two , they would be climbing onto tables, hitting each other, knocking over , and otherwise doing everything except for the activity I had asked them to do.

It seemed like there was nothing I could do to maintain or even any semblance of order whatsoever. I tried being nice, and the kids just me. I tried being firmer and stricter, and that would work for a few minutes but then they would start bouncing off the walls again. Even with another teacher me, we just could not control the class. I even had to threaten to cancel it if they didn’t – and then I had to follow through on that so they could see I wasn’t bluffing.

Well, after a lot of trial and , I found that the best activities for holding their attention were ones that involved everybody working as a group. One day we were doing a game that involved three teams, and I came up with a points system where the teams could gain points for following and doing the movements I asked for, or lose points if they disobeyed or were disruptive. I asked the other teacher to score on a piece of paper, and so many points were won and lost that by the time the game finished I had no clue which team was in the .

The other teacher gave me the scorecard, and when I tallied up all the points I saw that all three teams had tied with eight points each. I I’d need a tiebreaker, but I had no time to think of one – all the kids were looking at me and waiting for me to the results. So I said that team 1 had eight points, team 2 had eight points, and team 3 also had eight points.

Well, the room just exploded in . The kids all started jumping up and down and hugging and congratulating each other. There was a huge on every face. I was stunned by their reaction. I had been expecting them to be kinda disappointed since the result was pretty anticlimactic. I mean, I had really played up the whole “ ” aspect, and in the end there was no clear winner. But the kids showed me that maybe it’s more important to things all together than to be obsessed with winning.