“We’re American, this is not okay”

[Lauren Bundy]

There’s nothing like a game of Kahoot to spice up a gray Friday morning. Both French classes I observed this week participated in a contest run by the American Association of Teachers of French focused on Francophone culture trivia. Students played two Kahoots; the first one was for practice and the second was for a chance to be entered into a lottery to win $200 through the AATF—talk about extrinsic motivation! But I want to focus on students’ reactions to the Kahoot, because I think it reveals something about the dominant school culture and how students buy into it.

First of all, by pitting students against each other in a quantifiable way, the trivia activity underscored the school expectation that, in the words of our class handout, “students will value individual achievement” and “students will compete.” Many did and were very vocal about it. French 3 is typically marked by a running commentary from students, and Friday was no exception as students commented on each other’s performance and their own. It indicated students’ investment in the Kahoot, but I can’t help but wonder if there was a silent population of students that didn’t get involved in the commentary and were in fact uncomfortable with the competitive nature of the activity. I did notice a student in French ⅘ who never selected an answer for one of the questions and let the timer run out instead. The logical move in terms of the competition would be to guess, because there’s no penalty for getting the wrong answer, but evidently she was not thinking about the competition in terms of maximizing her chance of winning; she just seemed stressed out by not knowing the answer.

Additionally, I want to discuss students’ reactions to the contents of the cultural trivia. The questions made an effort to focus on the French-speaking world beyond France; questions focused on Francophonie throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania. I’m glad to see that classroom activities stretch beyond Eurocentrism. In fact, while waiting for the previous class period to end before entering the classroom, I heard Denise explaining the history of the Cajun population of Louisiana to her French 1 class, describing how they were persecuted and expelled from Canada. Teaching about groups of people who are often overlooked in educational materials in the US is one step towards undoing the dominant, one-sided narrative of American history.

That being said, one student in French 3, Peter, caught my attention in his response to a Kahoot question along the lines of “which of these cities is not in Morocco?” Indignantly, he declared, “We’re American, this is not okay”—meaning that, as an American, he shouldn’t be expected to know anything about Morocco. Admittedly, this elicited a response from me: “That’s why you’re learning about it.” While this was hardly an eloquent defense of learning about diversity, I wasn’t quite feeling up to the task of explaining to Peter that his remark relied on a deeply flawed assumption of American hegemony. Another student, Quinn, consistently knew the answers to questions because, as I gathered, his family had moved around and lived in several places throughout the globe. However, when he got a question about Canadian provinces wrong, he declared, “I know geography, I just hate Canada.” I was struck by how students were quick to justify not knowing something by essentially arguing that that knowledge wasn’t relevant to them.

It’s also worth noting the importance of teacher expectations in the classroom. While I’m not prepared to assess if Denise’s expectations differ for students based on their backgrounds like my group on Wednesday read about in Cone’s “The Gap is in our Expectations,” I can at least offer confirmation that low teacher expectations encourage low student outcomes. Not much of what I have to say in this regard is new if you’ve read this blog before, but I genuinely believe that Denise’s French students would be capable of understanding and speaking a lot more French than she gives them credit for, if she only tried speaking more French with them. They’re smart kids; while some of the Francophone culture trivia was challenging, I was impressed by how much they did know or could at least deduce. I just wish they were given French language material that challenged them and promoted learning.

Finally, a quick comment on a discovery I made this Friday: I don’t think the students all know each other’s names. When Denise tasked a few students with handing back old assignments, they weren’t always sure who was who. I suppose that I’ve only been remarking which students are friendly with each other, and not who never interacts with each other. This seems to run contrary to the “pedagogy of talk” that Cone describes in “The Gap is in our Expectations”—if students don’t even know each other’s names, how can they feel comfortable talking with each other, let alone in an unfamiliar language?

[Adam Ross]

These are really valuable observations, I think they point out some of the toxic parts of competition in the classroom; students stressing over not knowing the answer and shutting down, the mentality of “oh you all knew that and I didn’t? That’s okay because we shouldn’t even know that as Americans, so I’m still the best!” and my least favorite, hating Canada! Ever since I started playing Rec Soccer in first grade, I have always been staunchly non-competitive, and I felt like this gave me a disadvantage in Kahoots. I often had other things on my mind and didn’t mind coming in the middle of the class, but I did not enjoy the attitudes of my classmates when they beat me. I think competition can bring out the worst in people, and in the educational setting people are willing to say “it’s for school” and use that to excuse whatever nasty behavior they display.

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