to have or to have not (a seat)

So I found myself in front of a class of 27 energetic sophomores today (instead of the 15 that I'm used to). Blessed with so many eager-to-learn, um, learners, I decided to try out an English simulation activity I stumbled across on the internet called the Global Inequality Game. I found it here.

The Global Inequality Game

The idea is that this class of 27 students simulates the population of the whole world---or in other words, during the simulation, each student represents about 240 million people (and I thought I had issues). Around the room there are six signs for a particular region in the world, like "Europe," "Latin America," "USA and Canada," or "Africa." The class has distribute itself in the right proportion so that each sign/region has the appropriate, approximate number of students.

Basically, once they've decided where everyone should stand, you move everybody to Asia.

Next, you take 27 chairs. Each chair represents 1/27th of the world's total wealth. Those are some valuable chairs. Now the students work together to decide where the chairs (i.e. the wealth of the world) goes.

You're left with some thought-provoking images. Take a look:

Here's Asia. Lots of standing people here.

Compare this to Latin America.

And now to Africa.

And now look at Europe...

...and the rest of North America.

Oh yeah. And then there's Australia and the Pacific Islands. It seems that nobody lives there anyway :-)