Day 6 - Miriam

What is one thing you wanted to spend more time on?
This might be the easiest prompt for me during this time of reflection. The answer is easy: I wish I could have spent more time on our last unit on religious cults. Simply put, we, quite literally, ran out of time. I ran it right up to the final. We finished it, and I cannot stress how literally I mean this, the day before final exams started and then my students took their final exam on what we'd read for this unit... Which is not something I'd normally recommend... And yet, it was a major success for me and my students... So... allow me to break it down. 

The Basics.

Essentially, we spent this unit doing a mystery type Role playing game (RPG). Students were in groups and spent a day creating a detective character. They build their character using the Roman virtues and qualities we'd spent all year working on. Students chose skills as well which played a major role in how things went for them. 

Every other day (yes, a quick turn over!) they'd get a new piece of the story and they'd have the period to work through the story and come up with their character's immediate next steps. I would then spent the next 48 hours reading their responses and, based on their skills and qualities, I'd respond in some way. Either with a fail or success or with more details. Without giving too much away (as I am planning to turn this into something else), it kind of went like this:
Story 1: description of crime and crime scene. Introduction of some major religious characters.
Story 2: description of all the other people (Romans and others) who are at the crime scene. 
Story 3: There's a commotion. 
Story 4: You follow a certain group of characters to the woods
Story 5: You meet the witch. 

​And... that was all we had time for. 

The Players.

Again, without revealing too much...

1. Main Religious Characters
   1. Sacerdos (high priest)
   2. virgines Vestales (Vestal Virgins)
   3. milites (soldiers)
   4. strigae (witches)
   5. Christiani (Christians)
   6. other random cult members
2. Skill Sets
   
   1. Students had to choose a certain number of skills that HEAVILY affected their success rate. A few that were the most amusing (on my part)
      1. scribere - without this skill, groups couldn't write messages
      2. legere - without this skill, groups couldn't read
      3. Graeciam dicere - without this skill, groups couldn't read, interpret, or speak Greek... which was key for one of the cults
      4. Aegyptiam dicere - see #3 but with Egyptian
3. Qualitates
   
   1. ​We'd spent the entire year on these. Students had started with a list of 12 Roman virtues and we slowly expanded that to include other qualities (some of which were negative). These were also key and allowed students to play their characters in fun ways and be creative. 
      

The Feedback. 

First off, let me say that this is something that probably 99% of my students had never done before. There was a lot of anxiety with that, but... we developed a system. I'd provide the support in the alternating classes with vocabulary and culture. On game days, they'd get the stories and about 10 minutes in I'd start to circulate. Sometimes I'd provide lexical support only, other times I might help them with a clue on what to do next. Then... we took the final, but more on that in a minute. Here is some of the feedback I got:

1. They loved getting pieces of the story. 
2. They loved being able to control some aspects of the story. 
3. A mystery made the story 200% more compelling.
4. Because they were IIIs, they already had the basics to handle this kind of open-ended game. At some point (story 2-3) they actually asked me not to circulate so often, because they were compelled to try and figure it out on their own. 
5. They liked learned the culture for this. 
6. They greatly appreciated that I sprinkled all our other units into these stories. The stories included the qualities (as above), adventure themes (we read Itinera Petri), poetry (the witch's song), and medicine, in addition to the religious cults. 

So, the final. I was really nervous about it. Usually I use stories we've read throughout the semester, but this time I put all 5 of our most recent stories on it and let it be. The averages were awesome! The kids did oustandingly on it and when I inquired as to why, this is what they said. 

• The stories included all the elements of what we'd read, rather than separating it all out. 
• The stories were recent. 
• The stories weren't too hard nor too easy. We had to think, we were challenged, but also supported. 
• They also really liked that we didn't *technically* have a review week. We played a long game. We got into the language and forgot we were working with the language. 

What I wish I had time to do.

Oh man... I could have expanded this into at least 5 more stories. I had plans of after the witch encounter.... they might encounter the Christians, go to a ritual of Isis or Proserpina... perhaps they'd get dragged into a thing with Mithras... The possibilities were endless. This was a point we both lamented: teacher and students... If only we'd had more time!