The Discovery
Whilst perusing the livejournal page of another esteemed noder, I came across the reference to www.freerice.com. Figuring that since I had at least three other things that I really ought to be doing, I happily clicked over to the FreeRice site and started playing. I loved the graphic to the right of the screen: a lovely polished wooden bowl that slowly fills and empties and fills again. The words themselves intrigued me; I know my way around the SAT and the GRE, and I recognized several right answers and several attractive but wrong answers. Then too, the skill level counter wakened the sleeping dragon that is my competitive side. I would -- would, do you hear me? -- reach level 50 if I had to sit and click till my laptop became obsolete.
On my first session, I donated 3,450 grains of rice before I stopped myself. Dang thing is addictive, I told myself. Gotta tell Mom and Dad.
Come on, try it. All the cool kids are doing it.
So I emailed mom. I told her it was fun, and that it was doing the world good, and that at the very least she and dad would learn lots of nifty new words to use in crossword puzzles. She emailed me back three hours later telling me that after an hour she made herself stop. Dang thing.
I went back on and did another 1,160 grains. I told myself I could quit any time, but I knew I was hooked, and being hooked is fine if everyone else is hooked, too.
I knew what I had to do next.
How FreeRice Teaches
I cannot think of a skill that is less connected to real world problem solving than reading a word and picking its synonym, but nevertheless there are several standardized tests that require you to do just that very thing. I tutor those very tests. Huh.
"Well, darling," says I, to my poor innocent student "how about you do a little something for practice? Tell you what. You go to this website and you play this for a while. You tell me what level you get to next time I see you, mmmkay?"
And off darling goes to become another FreeRice addict.
One little girl, a fifth grader of no small talent, got to level 35 on her first try. She has found that the answer choices that are correct for one word are often the wrong answers for another word. She practices process of elimination.
Another girl, this time a sixth grader, has discovered that the roots we study in session can help her decide which answers are likelier than others. She has learned to decode words.
My GRE student has learned that if she takes down the words she misses and puts them on flash cards and studies them on the treadmill, she gets more answers right on her practice GRE tests. She has learned to learn from her mistakes.
And another fifth grade girl, a lovely, kind hearted girl, has persuaded her teachers to count her time on FreeRice toward her quota of Community Service Hours. She has learned to play the system.
But the hungry? What about the hungry?
I figure that amongst the lot of us obsessively clicking synonym after synonym, we've reached a pound of rice. That's enough for one hungry person to eat for a week. That's one less week of worrying where the next meal is going to come from. I like to think that makes a difference.
And your sleeping dragon? Did you hit level 50?
Yes. I did hit level 50.
And promptly dropped to level 46.