The Hindi Scavenger Hunt and Gossip with Prof. Khanna

Every Thursday, Kusum Knapczyk tries to constantly challenge her Hindi students to understand the material they had learned during that week. Her philosophy is simple: students should not only do homework, class work, and quizzes to learn Hindi but also engage with the material through activities such as hosting a cooking class and creating a product advertisement in Hindi. This week, Kusum created a Scavenger Hunt that her students in 101 and 203 would participate in.

In each class, students were broken up into pairs and were given special tasks to do different activities around campus. My partner Shreyas and I were given clues to navigate around Duke’s Divinity School and learn more about the artwork, architecture, and people housed there. Shreyas and I started our scavenger hunt in Divinity Café, where we met Prof. Satti Khanna for our first task. Our task was to each ask Prof. Khanna two Hindi questions to learn more about Hindi world. What started with a question about why Prof. Khanna chose to teach Hindi led to Prof. Khanna sharing his experience about teaching a class on top of Duke’s Chapel one morning.

At the end of the discussion, Shreyas and I shared Indian biscuits with Prof. Khanna and went straight into our next task. In our next task, Kusum had directed us in Hindi to navigate towards a hallway of paintings. Here, portraits lined the wall of previous Divinity students with descriptions of what each cherished about life. Shreyas and I choose portraits’ descriptions we felt we could relate to and were inspired by and translated them into Hindi.

Next, we both went to the library where I met the rest of the groups in my class. Our job was to look for four Hindi magazines amongst a vast collection of magazines. Afterward, we as a class was instructed to go to the Duke Gardens and take a picture in front of the Lilly Pond. Each team then uploaded their pictures, tasks, and reviews of the activity on Google Drive. One student said “The scavenger hunt was very fun and it was nice to use Hindi outside of the classroom”, while another student expressed that “it was a nice change of pace. It was a good way to practice our reading and communicating with Prof. Satti Khanna because we got to practice our conversational skills. I hope to continue doing this in my other Hindi classes”. Overall, most students had a wonderful time participating in the Scavenger Hunt.

More importantly, everyone had a lot of fun. In my opinion, the best way to learn is by having fun, and I had so much fun talking to Prof. Khanna, my teammate, and my classmates. From translating individuals’ stories into Hindi to describing the pond in Duke garden with my classmates, I had fun at every step of the Scavenger Hunt trying to use all the tenses and vocabulary I have learned from Kusum during that week.