Today's RACE activity

Today my third period class began to read The Giver.  To build interest, I showed the movie trailer first.  There are two good quotes in the trailer that I thought could be used to practice RACE.  

The first is, "the way things look and the way things are, are very different." 

"If people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong," is the second.  

I wrote the second quote on the board and asked the class how many agreed with the statement.  Many students raised their hands.  More than I expected.  

I asked, "have you all really made bad choices today?"  

Students-"Yes."

Me-"OK" (who am I to disagree?)

I then told them to RACE the answer out and to give a specific example of a bad choice or decision that they made at one point in their lives.

Some students responded:

"I disagree with the statement 'if people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.'  For example, One time my dad told me not to bring my iPad into the bathroom but I did anyway.  It fell in the toilet and took two weeks to get repaired.  I should have just listened to my dad."   

This is a complete RACE response but he wrote 'disagree' instead of 'agree.'

"I agree with the statement because a lot of people make the wrong choices and mess up their lives.  Some people don't think before they act." 

 This is not a complete RACE response, so I asked the student to correctly restate the quote and give a specific example to back up his viewpoint.

The entire activity took about twenty minutes.  I made sure to circulate and read every student response.  Many student responses looked like the second example at first, but corrections were made and they all got credit for the assignment.  

Spelling was not perfect.  A lot of "their/they're" mistakes and "your/you're."  I corrected a few capitalization and punctuation mistakes as well in that time.