A few weeks ago, before the start of the current test-prep session, I was having a final “fun” class with my TOEFL2 cohort, and a humorous incident happened that I meant to write about but which I put in my little queue-o-possible-posts and promptly forgot.
We were playing a game called “Things” – with slightly modified rules to make it a bit simpler. The idea behind the game is for players to list things you need in response to various prompts (e.g. “Things you want to do before you die” for a rather banal example) and then the students have to guess who wrote which things. So there is a chance for humor and deception as students try to list things that won’t point back to them.
Anyway, we had a prompt which was, “Things you need for the zombie apocalypse.” After explaining the meaning of “apocalypse,” the students wrote their responses, I collected their responses, and we went through them and they tried to guess who said what.
One student wrote, “zombie costume.” This never would have occurred to me, and I thought it was quite brilliant, so I was laughing and commenting on it. After we ended that turn, we discussed for a while if such an approach would really be useful. We decided it would depend on how the zombies detect humans – is it based on smell, or appearance, or behavior, or something else?
This in turn led me back to one of my favorite pop-culture interpretations of zombism, which is the “Party Rock” video by LMFAO that I posted here a few years back. In that video, clearly the main characters are able to trick the zombies by mimicking their behavior – another type of zombie costume.
[daily log: log, walking, 6 km]