Would you rather…?

Would you rather swim in a pool filled with frogs or bathe in whipped cream every day?

No question. I’d take the whipped cream, even though I’d smell like a carton of  warm sour milk by the end of the week.  I hate frogs.

Yesterday at the Indiana Writing Project’s workshops “ISTEP: The Write Strategies,” my colleagues Kathy Flatter and Lindsey Thompson shared several fun ways to make the writing to a prompt genre more engaging.  One of them was the “Would You Rather…” game.     You may remember the concept:  Two equally difficult scenarios are juxtaposed for players to consider... and defend.  In the board game version, you might have to predict the response of another player or the consensus of the group after discussion to earn a point.

But there are also websites devoted to these ethical and silly conundrums.

Here is an example from nicka who submitted a proposition to the sometimes inappropriate for school website http://www.rrrather.com/ :  Would you rather… go way back in time and meet your ancestors OR go way into the future and meet your great grandchildren? Interestingly, the website actually breaks down the total 289,452 votes by gender and country, which could be a great tool for prediction exercises and higher order thinking…. but that’s an idea for another day.

I agree with Kathy and Lindsey that using these questions IS a super way to engage kids in creating argument.  Some of the choices can be really wacky and appealing, especially for kids who are learning to create and support written argument.  But I am in the throes of trying to help ninth graders respond to multi-part prompts about Shakespearean text, and these questions seem too simplistic at this point in my unit.

So, I’ve decided to write a few of my own, two-part challenges.  “Would You Rather… Double Dips” I will call them, or  WYRDD’s.

Here’s one that I am going to use in an online discussion next week: Would you rather… Pick a fight with someone you hated and be terribly wounded, OR defend the honor of someone and be beaten in public?

Here’s another:  Would you rather… Marry your true love and never see your family again, OR marry someone rich and retain your family’s love and support?

Okay, so maybe these prompts aren’t as engaging as the whipped cream  or time travel ones, but they do meet my academic needs.  They connect to the themes of Romeo and Juliet, and they provoke a moral or ethical responses, a sure hit with teenagers.

But they are also more than that: Students will need to discuss BOTH elements of their choice, not just one and justify themselves. That’s the part that will help them with the multi-layered prompts they will see on their state tests, the part they are currently struggling with in classroom writing.

So this week we’ll do a couple of WYRDD’s together and then students will create their own WYRDD’s from their independent reading books and post them for their peers. By Friday, I 'm hoping they'll be ready to take on a double- dip essay prompt about Romeo and Juliet, without any overt help from the whipped cream or frogs.