If you can’t experiment on your students, there isn’t much fun in teaching.

Every now and then I have a class that has a lot of extra classes. Normally, if I have three classes, they tend to meet the same number of times. For example, Class One might meet 22 times, Class Two 22 times and Class Three 24 times. Class Three gets some extra English, which they don’t always appreciate, but a couple classes isn’t that difficult to manage.

However, once every few years the timing of holidays and school function days result in a larger difference in classes. For example, a couple years ago, I had a class that met 7 times during the winter term and another in the same grade that met 13 times. This meant the second class got almost twice as much English as the first class.

Because of that extra time, I decided to experiment on the longer class by having them make a TV commercial. They had to create a new product, a visual aid and a 60 second commercial. It was a bit of mad scientist experimentation but it turned out well enough that I ended up stealing the idea for higher grade a couple years later.

This year, in my first year high school class (US 10th grade) a couple of the classes are meeting four times more than the third class. I’ve therefore decided to put on my mad scientist hat and experiment on them.

This term, the plan is for them to make a two minute commercial advertising a lesser known prefecture (the Japanese version of a state). They have to research the prefecture and make a poster/advertisement for it.

The most fun happened at the beginning: after they formed pairs, each pair sent a student to draw a prefecture. When the first pair got a prefecture that isn’t very interesting there was a lot of excitement for every drawing after that. It was mostly interesting to see which prefectures where considered cool and which ones were considered horrible.

Unfortunately, that’s probably the end of the fun, but that’s part of the experiment.