Caveat: H┴∀Ǝp

As I’ve written before here, I sometimes use my Tarot cards in my classes, as a kind of cross between communicative listening exercise and entertaining reward. Many (maybe most) of my students are fascinated to have me “read their future” about some question. They ask about their upcoming test scores, their health or the health of family members, about their careers and future prospects for marriage. I keep my readings pretty generic, and of course, like any Tarot reader, I use clues in their questions and things I know about my students to make the answers more interesting and relevant.
Last night, I had a confident fifth-grader, Soyeon, insist that it was her turn to “read” the cards for me, instead. This doesn’t happen often – the kids are intimidated by the 30 pages of printed out “card meanings” that I use with the cards, to lend some legitimacy to my interpretations and to find plausible meanings – I don’t have the 178 possible meanings memorized. Most of the kids understand the principle that an inverted (reversed) card would have an opposite meaning, too, so I can play with that when it happens.
Soyeon was happy to lay down the cards and page through my printout of meanings, however. She told me to ask a question. Keeping to a nice, “safe” topic, I asked about my future health. Most of my students know about my cancer saga – it’s been the background of many a spontaneous classroom discussion. So that gave her something interpret against, too.
She laid down three cards: a past card, present card, and future card. She turned over the past card, and it was “The World.” She looked at the printout, but she didn’t just read it out loud. The printout, to be honest, has a lot of difficult vocabulary. I made it that way on purpose – it gives me a chance to teach something when I read the cards, and it also allows me to “hedge” meanings when I feel like things are too gloomy or creepy or anything else. Soyeon thought about what she read for a moment, and complained she didn’t understand it. I told her to just look at the picture on the card and use the words she did understand to come up with her own idea.
“You traveled everywhere the world. It was good.”
Not bad, right?
Next, she turned over the present card. It was the 9 of wands. This was one of those eerie moments when random Tarot hits really close to accuracy. The meaning of this card, as I’d put on my printout, is something like “a warrior has won a battle but now must rest.”
She said something like, “You got sick and it was like a battle. Now you’re tired.”
Then she turned over the final card. It was “Death,” but reversed (upside-down).
She laughed. She only glanced at the printout, before saying, triumphantly, “You should be dead, but you keep refusing.”
That seemed really clever, and exactly the right way to read a card like that.
It was a successful class.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]