Some years ago I found myself teaching English in a summer school in England.

The classes (20 students) were 4 hours long - all morning. It's hard to keep children's attention for this long when their on ‘holiday’ and when you are only armed with a copy of an English language course, you are very likely facing a very long haul!

The experience, however, allowed me to make an interesting discovery. In Spain they say ‘El hambre agudiza el ingenio', which roughly translates as ‘hunger sharpens ones resourcefulness’. As I was eating lunch in the school canteen, it occurred to me that the class needed an unusual dimension adding to it to keep the children attentive. I then thought that the macaroni I had perched on the end of my fork may well give me the chance I needed to add that little bit more spice to the classes.

After having a word in the cook's ear and being allowed to take a kilo of uncooked macaroni into the class, I then made the macaroni the unit of reward for just about every classroom activity. It's amazing what people (I later found out the effect is similar with adults) are willing to do to win a macaroni, whereas a boring old team point on the blackboard doesn't really have much bite as you move into hour 3 of a class.

The point is, people react incredibly enthusiastically towards anything that's unusual and a little eccentric. They enjoy being involved in activities that gently push back the frontiers of the acceptable code of conduct.

During the whole morning students accumulated ‘points’ in the currency of pasta, which were jealously guarded. By the end of the class, nobody knew just how much macaroni everybody else had, so it had the effective of building expectation towards the ‘final count down', where we would see how pasta-rich people had become. Previously nonchalant students started to show much greater interest, and the class started to develop ‘in jokes’ about the macaroni phenomenon.

The approach was so successful, that chick peas were the next days fare. The cook thought I was nuts, the kids thought I was ace, and our supervisor just worried about cockroaches. ‘Don't worry', I told him - this food is worth far too much to the students to leave it lying around!

The moral of this story is that being a little bit ‘different’ in a class is good. So try it out!

Adrian Allen is one of the co-founders of http://www.findateacher.es This is a bilingual search tool for private teachers to advertise themselves to students. It can be used either for free, or by paying a small subscription fee for better ranking in the datbase.