Disturbing Trend

So I'm not a very good teacher yet, and every time I find something that remotely works I immediately use it in every single class where it would be remotely applicable. Sometimes this works well, sometimes I grossly misjudge my audience, and sometimes the effects are just incredibly bizarre.

The latest example is the Detective Game, which, for the unitiated, involves sending a volunteer out into the hallway, deciding on a criminal, deciding on a crime, sometimes deciding on a victim, and bringing the detective back into the room to ask penetrating questions and try to force the witnesses to crack under the pressure (read: start giggling uncontrollably). It's not very complicated, it's not especially exciting, except for the few seconds when it's time to choose volunteers, but it gets the job done and it's wicked good for practicing questions in the past tense. (To illustrate while protecting the innocent, guilty, and "dead" I will use the French equivalents of John and Jane.)

So I have played it with my sixieme (6th grade), and the crimes and questions are very simple. "Have you got the glove?" and so forth. And I played it with my cinqieme (7th grade) and they already know the past tense, so the questions become things like "Did you take the glove?" and "Did you sell the drugs?" and occasionally "Did you attack Jean?" Today, however, was the first time I played it with my quatrieme (8th grade) students, and, since they are very familiar with the past, you have to work to find verbs they don't already know. So for about half an hour today, I had a pint-sized Sam Spade wannabe demanding of his classmates "Did you decapitate Jeanne?"

I rather suspect that were I to play it with the ninth graders, we'd eventually degenerate into "Did you take over the world?" and "Did you cause the Holocaust?"