Starting a game club with my students!

HEY guys, I know it’s been a while, but what’s up? We kind of have a lot to catch up on because honestly a lot has been going on, but I had a sudden inspiration to record my day so we’ll skip to that. Today I started a club with my students.

Planning the Club

I’ve been trying to start a club for a few weeks now. The idea first came when I was in Accra several weeks ago. I was visiting to see a dermatologist–all things considered it was worth it because traveling to and being in Accra meant I also got the chance to sleep and relax in some air conditioned rooms and get some nice meals. The meals I got were nachos, sushi, stir-fry, and more, and honestly they were a much-needed break from banku and pepe, which you would think I would have grown to like more at this point considering I’ve eaten it for most dinners for the past several weeks, but unfortunately I do not.

Anyway, while I was staying in Accra I also got to visit the nicer Melcom (Ghana’s Walmart) there, and as I was perusing the toy aisle (as you do) I had the idea to buy a bunch of board games and start a CLUB with my JHS students. Well, in truth I first got the idea of playing board games with them from my mom–she originally recommended playing bingo with them–and then I ended up finding Connect 4 (or rather the cheap knock-off version, Plot 4) at the Melcom in the Northern region and playing it with my students occasionally, to great interest and overall response. So I knew I could get them interested in board games (is Connect 4 a board game? It doesn’t have a board) and I also saw it as a way I could engage the students in strategy thinking as well as give them a space to have fun and relax for a bit. So as I stood there in the toy aisle staring at a bunch of fun-looking games I decided to go all in and buy a ton. I’ll tell you, they were NOT cheap, at least considering how much I “make” in my monthly stipend, but I figured I just spent a bunch of money on those non-local meals that were also not cheap, so I could at least afford to use some of what I had towards the students too. I started loading games into my little basket–a Monopoly-esque business game, a Scrabble-esque word game, a Jenga-esque stacking game, an interesting looking Geography game, a few others, and a couple of Rubik’s Cubes for good measure. I also made sure to grab a few small toys to offer as rewards for the point system that I created for my classes to encourage good behavior, but that’s for another post. 

So I managed to lug all of that through a few cities, onto a couple buses, and finally on a tro tro all the way back to my village. I couldn’t start the club immediately though, because it was Ramadan, which meant all the Muslims in the village (essentially everyone) were fasting every day for the entire month from dawn to dusk, 4 or 5am to 6:20pm (those were the times I was able to get out of people). Another side-story for another post, I did do the full food and water fast one day and became extremely dehydrated and stopped sweating because I ran out of fluids, and so I did not do it again. I did a few more food fasts throughout the month but the people in my village have told me that they definitively do not count that as fasting. Anyway, the full 30-day fast starts at JHS level, AKA all of my students, so they were overall low energy for the month especially towards the end of the school day, and there was no way I was getting them to come back later in the afternoon. I continued playing Plot 4 with the students every few days (finding a time when they were not being engaged by any teachers despite it being during school hours was certainly not difficult), as well as sowing the seeds for our upcoming Game Club. 

Finally, earlier this week was Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday observing the end of Ramadan (also perhaps warranting another blog, but right now you can actually go to the Peace Corps Ghana Facebook page for a post there about my Eid al-Fitr!). That means the students have had more energy since restarting classes on Wednesday (they’ve started spending their un-engaged hours playing football in class again). I decided that even with the school term ending in only a couple of weeks, it was time to start our club.

Club Attempt #1

I first planned on having our club yesterday–Thursday. I told the students in all of my classes that we would be having our first meeting after school at 3:00pm. We decided on that time together–my Form 3 class confirmed it was a good time to meet. For context, the school day officially ends at 2:00pm, so they would have an hour to go home, relax a bit and get some food, then come back. One of the benefits of being in a small community is no one is ever very far from their home.

After school that day I went back over to the classrooms at 3:00. And…nobody came. Okay, I’ve been sort of mentally preparing for this–at least, I’ve already heard Peace Corps Volunteer stories of planning a club or meeting, even with adults, and no one showing up. I was a little disappointed, but at least not entirely surprised. After waiting for 20 minutes or so, I went back to my room (which, to be fair, is within 100 yards of the classrooms).

At around 3:45, my student Adamu came. She’s one of my better students in Form 3, and as I believe I’ve said before, was one of the first people to really help me get acquainted when I got here. She also brought her brother, Sulemana. So, staying in the little teacher’s quarters courtyard, we got the bench and chairs and started playing Plot 4. After a bit, I went and got my cards and began teaching them Go Fish. Side note: for most Ghanaians, if you say you’re going to play cards, it means you’re going to play exactly one game–officially named “Spar” online but really called “Spa” by everyone here since they don’t really use the r sound much. But I had taught Go Fish to my homestay family back during training so I already knew it was a big hit. Eventually my student Sule also wandered in. Both of those boys are actually named Abdulai Sulemana (surname first) and are both in my Form 2 class so I’ve had to officially designate which one I’m referring to with the shortened nickname. Cards went well, and since I had told everyone I planned on us voting for a club president, I instead decided to name Adamu as Temporary President–I also wanted to encourage her, since she’s one of my most engaged and participatory girls in class, whereas the boys tend to be more talkative and active in class, because of gender norms and all that.

The next day, AKA today, AKA Friday, I showed up for my 8:00am maths class, which unfortunately unsurprisingly about a third of the students showed up to on time–and even though I have that class at that time every week, it’s hard for me to blame them, because all of the other teachers had decided to go home yesterday so I was the only one who actually showed up to teach. But little by little over the class time, more students started to dawdle in. Then at some point we started talking about the game club. I asked the students why they didn’t come to the club yesterday. Apparently, as my student Abdul-Hafiz told me, they all forgot. Not sure how much I believe that, but anyway, it then came up that we try again to have our game club TODAY. I can’t remember if it was my idea or someone else’s, but I was just surprised they agreed to it. I was skeptical they would come this time around, but Abdul-Hafiz assured me they would remember.

Club Attempt #2

Later on in the afternoon, after a short catnap, I headed over to the classrooms again at 3:00. And…nobody came. At least, none of the JHS students came, but when some of the younger children in the neighborhood saw I was hanging out in the classrooms, they came over to check it out. First came Saphia and Rashida, two young girls who live nearby, I would estimate around 5 or 6, who come to my room often. They typically want toffees and have started offering to help wash the dirty dishes that I haven’t cleaned to get them. I can’t really understand most of what they say to me, since they only speak Dagbani, but we’re able to communicate the basics. They often, as they did today, also bring Saphia’s younger sister Rahama, who I would estimate is about 2 or 3. The three came into the classroom where I was laying on a desk bench using my phone and the older girls wanted to see it, so I opened a game for them. I got them started on a block breaking game I have, but by the time I looked over again a few minutes later they had somehow managed to navigate their way to Subway Surfer. Interesting what knowledge even these young kids, removed from a lot of the typical technology we use, still pick up. Later on, some other slightly older primary school boys came in and also wanted to try the games, so they all (sort of) shared, and to keep some of them busy I drew their faces on the chalkboard.

I waited until 3:45 this time, and then decided to head back to my room. I got situated to relax for a bit again. Then one of my students, Muzamil, showed up at 4:15. He said he was, indeed, here for game club, and that his friends were also coming, so I got the Plot 4 and another game and headed to the classroom. We played Plot 4 until a few others did show up, and I decided to open a new game to start with them. I opened Ludu, which is a very popular board game played locally, with a die and tokens. Online the game is apparently known more widely as Ludo, and I personally recognized it having similarities to newer games from toy companies that I’d played as a kid, like Sorry! and Trouble.

Students playing Ludu–I got a special jumbo version that goes on the ground!

For the next 45 minutes or so, to my repeated excitement, more students sporadically streamed in. First Adamu, Sulemana, and Sule came again, and after a round of Go Fish, even more students came in. By around 5:00, we had a whopping 19 students who had come! I was ecstatic that so many had ended up showing up, and not just one demographic but both boys and girls from all of my different classes (Forms 1-3). 19 is near the size of each class, so almost a third of the JHS had shown up.

Other students playing Go Fish

I was ready to have our first official meeting. I got everyone’s attention, which just like in class was difficult and had to be done repeatedly throughout, and began leading a meeting. Like I said, I wanted to have elections, to give the students an early taste of government like I had in school clubs. But in fact, our first order of business (a phrase I taught to the students) was to decide on a club name. So far I was just sort of going by “Game Club,” but I wanted to give the students the chance to make the club their own. I took everyone’s suggestions and added a few of my own, and we ended up with this list of potential names:

Potential club names that we brainstormed together

Some pretty good name options! You might notice the almost comically long option, Wunintira AKA Maligunaa Game Club. Pretty impressive name one of the students came up with. According to the students and Google, Wunintira translates to The Almighty Gives. Maligunaa is my honorary chief title–the students don’t call me that, but that’s what most of the community knows me as. And I didn’t know the students even had AKA, also known as, in their lexicon, but they encouraged me to use it a few times in this post. Anyway, for voting, I told every student they could vote for a maximum of 4 options, since we had so many. Here’s how the voting went:

Club name voting results

Of course that name won! We had to go to runoffs with Fun n’ Games Club, which was one of my suggestions, but I’m happy to go with the club favorite.

Next it was time for elections. I wanted to have a President and a Vice President of the club–just two students who could act as leaders, help make sure the others are behaving, help me with planning meetings, etc. I did it in the style of requiring students to nominate each other if they wanted to be on the board for voting–they couldn’t nominate themselves. If I’m being honest, that might’ve backfired slightly, mainly because it was mostly the boys being nominated. One girl was nominated, and said I could add her name to the list, but then changed her mind. But I really wanted to have some girl representation–I thought it would be good to have a leader who could connect better with the other girls, as well as for the students to see a girl as a leader (which they don’t currently do with the all-male student prefects). I told them I wanted to see a girl in the election, and reliably, Adamu started speaking up more–she nominated the other Form 3 girls, but they didn’t want to be on the board, which upset me a bit, because I felt like these girls were all just embarrassed about the idea of being in a position of power. I was sure Adamu would be a good leader, but none of the other students even nominated her–so in the end I decided that I would nominate her. This got some pushback from the other students–they were fine with me voting on the name, but some of them weren’t sure about this decision and were saying I shouldn’t get to nominate someone. But I decided to overrule them and added Adamu to the board.

We went onto voting, and I gave each student 2 votes out of the 5 names on the board. Abdul-Hafiz cleverly asked if he could vote for himself twice, which I said no to, but I respect it. And here’s the results:

Election results

Ibrahim was chosen as the President–he’s already the Senior Prefect and the oldest, so many of the students already look up to him. Second place ended up being a three-way tie! I only slightly tipped the scale–I voted for Adamu, which again garnered some pushback from the students. In the end, with the three-way tie, I decided it could only help to deliberate more responsibility and opportunity for leadership to the students, so I made all three runners-up Vice Presidents.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the stigma I’ve mentioned of the students preferencing boys over girls, particularly for leadership roles–a bias which comes across much less often in the actual classroom setting, but here was starting to emerge in full. If any of that upset you, it gets a bit worse. For each election winner, as I added their name to the right side of the board, other students cheered for them, unprompted by me. As I added Adamu’s name on the chalkboard, one of the older boys decided to boo. This really upset me, and I turned and was able to see who it was. I told him that I was taking a point off from him (using that point system I mentioned earlier), which garnered a reaction from the students (they’ve come to like the point system). I rarely take away points, I mostly only add them, for participating in class, or good attendance, or sharing a pen, or other good behavior I want to encourage. I didn’t want to take a point off here at our club, because I wanted it to be a safe space for the students where they didn’t have to feel on edge as they often otherwise would in the presence of a teacher. But I decided this was something I had to instill.

It was getting late–the sun would be setting not too long from now–so I wrapped up the meeting, planned our next one, and told the students we’d have to create club rules at the next meeting. Those rules will include Being Nice and Being Respectful. Unfortunately there was one more hit of disappointment to come–when I came back shortly after the meeting to take a picture of the board, one of the students had used chalk to scribble over and cross out Adamu’s name under the Vice Presidents title. I’ve seen students do this before to things they don’t like on the chalkboard, like if another student draws them and they don’t like it. I didn’t know who did this–it could be the same boy from earlier, or another. In the picture above, I erased the scribbles and rewrote Adamu’s name.

And that’s where we leave off with the club–sorry, with Wunintira AKA Maligunaa Game Club. A bit of difficulty at the end, but it just tells me that there is more work to do on getting both boys and girls to support girls. But there’s a lot else I’m excited for with this club–opportunity for hours of fun and learning to come! And I’m sorry but I FORGOT TO GET A PICTURE of all of the founding club members together–very sad, but I’ll get a picture at the next meeting!

Thanks for reading! I actually had a pretty eventful day today even outside of these club shenanigans, so I'm going to write about what else happened and post that as a separate blog tomorrow. Stay tuned!