White Fever

Last period I played Guess Who with the students. Rather than being original and using celebrity pictures to play, two years ago I scanned the cards from the board game and made 30 copies, then designed a sheet where students could cross out the wrong answers on a grid rather than messing up my nice coloured printouts. I make one student choose one of the pictures and have the other students ask questions and guess their identity. Usually the student who guesses correctly gets to choose next.

This time I brought some candies to add incentive to the game - whoever could give the correct answer the fastest would get one. However, this added a new problem - they started guessing when there were still three or four people it could be. This made the last stage of the game a bit of a farce. So I suggested to the teacher that we introduce a "batsu" (forfeit) for those who guessed wrongly. I suggested that the lively joker of a student who was currently "it" choose the nature of the batsu. After a while it was decided that if you guessed the wrong person, you would have to do this kind of pose:

As it turned out, a rather adorable, awkward sort of boy guessed the wrong answer. While it was clear to everyone sitting around the boy who was "it" that he had chosen Philippe because he resembled a "taco" (octopus), this awkward boy thought it was Herman. When called upon to do the batsu, instead of doing the UFO pose (above) he did this:

                                              

He also cried out something that, to the rest of the students and I, sounded like "White fever!" but was later confirmed to be "Night fever." As a result of this odd display, the boy who was "it" because non-functional with laughter, as did most of the rest of the class.