I have tarot cards, and I sometimes look at them curiously, although I don't believe in them.
A few months ago one of my TP2 students was messing with a "tarot" app on his smartphone, and showed it to me. I said we should have a class about tarot – the meanings of all the cards are quite complicated and I intuited it could be a good "conversation" class.
Recently, I did this, and it was a spectacular success. I've never seen middle-school students so engaged, in English, on a topic. I have them all a 6 page interpretation catalog – a listing of possible meanings for each card. Then they would ask a question and someone – I or one of the students – would lay out the cards and read the future.
They asked about academic future, careers, and, inevitably with teenagers, boyfriends or girlfriends or love. But they were very interested. It was a remarkable English class.
After they ran out of personal questions they dared to ask the cards, a few of them started coming up with political questions – perhaps because they know I tend to get rather animated and interested in these questions. The cards for a question regarding the future of the neverending North Korea / South Korea conflict were eerily accurate with respect to the past – they were cards of fraternal conflict and deception. The cards for the future implied some virtuous resolution, which the students found disconcertingly optimistic.
Then they asked who would win the American election. We decided, pretty much unanimously, that the cards implied that Obama would mess something up and Romney would win in the fall. When I said that Romney was an American "Saenuri" (i.e. conservative party) one student said, humorously, "Oh, then the US is in very big trouble. Ruined! Ruined!"
We all laughed.