Watching Sports Night makes you a good teacher

Remember all of those debate cases that my friends and I stole from West Wing episodes? You know, like abolish the penny, stop live fire bombing in Viques (ROB!), stop mandatory minimum sentences and laws that ban needle exchange programs, among others? Well, it turns out that Aaron Sorkin-written television programs are good for more than a competitive edge at debate tournaments, because I've started stealing lesson plans from episodes of "Sports Night," or at least one idea so far. There's this game called "celebrities" where everyone writes that names of, you guessed it, celebrities on pieces of paper and puts them in a hat. Then they try to get their team to guess as many of the names in the hat as they can in one minute without saying the person's name, or, as it was played in my English club last week, speaking anything but English. Most of my students have never had to speak English in a high pressure, timed environment of a game like this before so it works really well and just happens to be really fun for them and hilarious for me. Watching my seventh graders trying to explain who Bono is might just be the cutest thing I've ever seen. So yea, things are great on my end!