The Win as Much as You Can Game and my Frustrating Students

I have to admit that teaching, even though it is my favorite job, is very frustrating at times. Sometimes it's frustrating all the time. And the reason it is frustrating is because I tend to believe based on what my students say and do, that they are becoming more and more used to the assumption that the purpose of my class is for their entertainment rather than for their education. It occurs to me that I really don't like being laughed at, but I also don't like being serious, especially when it's this nice outside and the spring energy seeps into everyone and makes them (and especially me) want to be silly.

This combination of being sensitive to feeling ridiculed and being incredibly funny looking in a country where foreigners aren't quite considered human but instead are seen as amusing decoration—doesn't go well with my love of instructing through simulations. For some reason I really love simulators. Last week I ran my students through the lifeboat simulator. Next week I intend to run them through the Win-as-much-as-you-can simulator. The hardest part, by far, it getting the little hooligans to speak English. I'll have to put a lot of rules in place to enforce.

So my biggest fear after some six months of probably being a horribly unprofessional but really comically gifted teacher (I don't even have to try to be funny; they see me and they laugh.) is that they won't learn, that they haven't learned a thing because they think it's all a sideshow. That they won't appreciate the meanings of the simulators because they will be intent on having fun and not learning.