Surprise Endings: Lesson with a Twist

Have you ever played a trick on your students? I mean a benign prank- an activity or lesson that ended with you saying, “Gotcha!”

Here’s a lesson I’ve used for years with students from 5th to 8th grade and I’ve never had a student catch on to the “trick” until I began giving hints toward the end of the lesson. The focus of the lesson is a unique text, and it works well as a topic of discussion for Socratic Seminar or can be presented as something you recently read, found interesting, and wanted to share. You may have seen this text, but I doubt your students have.

A Little Background

Are you familiar with the Nacirema tribe? It’s a culture first introduced to me in a sociology course in college. In 1956, Horace Mann, an anthropologist, published a paper entitled “The Body Ritual of the Nacirema.” It was a satirical description of a very unusual culture that engages in peculiar practices such as a ritual that involves inserting hog hairs into the mouth. At some point, it was revealed that the Nacirema tribe was actually a veiled description of Americans. “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward, and the strange mouth rite is a description of the brushing of teeth (some original toothbrushes were made of hog hairs). All throughout the reading, students think they are learning about an ancient tribe, when in fact, it is a picture of the American culture of the 1950s.

I still remember the laughter after the “aha” moment when our professor explained what the text was all about, and I thought it would be fun to adapt the text for younger students. So, I chose a portion of the paper, changed a few things, typed it out, and presented it to my students as a mysterious finding in anthropology.

When you give this text to students to read, they may seem less than interested. The text is a little dry. However, this can be highly enjoyable for the teacher and is part of the set-up. After a discussion of this strange tribe, the real fun begins. I usually say something like, “What if I told you this was not about an ancient tribe at all?” Sometimes, students need additional hints, but there is often one student who will begin to figure it out. I almost always have to throw in, “You might want to check the name of that tribe, the spelling of the name…”

There’s something about an instant paradigm shift that our brains just LOVE. Students become totally engaged then, trying to figure out what each ritual means and looking for other words spelled backward in the text.

This lesson and my version of the text can certainly be improved upon, but I wanted to share it. There’s one condition: if you play this trick on your class, you MUST leave a comment and tell us how it went! I always had so much fun and even though I taught siblings over the years, I never had a student ruin the surprise ending!

This is a fun lesson to do for April Fools! You can find more HERE. Read more about incorporating novelty and surprise into your lessons HERE. Enjoy!