At the school where I work one of the rituals we go through is pass back classes for exams. This ritual involves teasing with scores, handing out answer sheets and exams, fielding questions and correcting mistakes and rejecting appeals for higher marks. That all takes about 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, the pass back class is 50 minutes long.

There then ensues a dilemma: do I waste paper and provide some sort of activity, do I only provide an activity to the class with the lowest average to punish then for doing badly, or do I let them do their winter homework whilst I mark other exams and/or write and/or simply waste time.

Today I opted for the latter with my junior high school classes. Unfortunately, for two of my classes, I was one of their first pass backs and they didn’t yet have homework. This meant I told them to relax with the caveats “No fighting, no kissing, no sports”. At least not while I’m in the class. (Note: the first and last are more common; as for the second, well, some guys have done things that might as well have involved kissing.)

Left with nothing else to do, the students fall back on games. There are brief rounds of Bloody Knuckles, which I stop because that counts as a sport. There is also a game involving groups of boys making fists and raising their thumbs whilst each takes turns guessing how many thumbs will be raised. There is a countdown and at “zero” one boy says a number as the others raise one thumb, both thumbs or no thumb. (It is possible to guess “none”.) If the guesser is right, he stays in the game and the guessing moves to another boy. This goes on until someone makes the final guess.

There is also a game involving flicking erasers around the table that is one part shuffle board and one part paper football. As near as I can tell–the rules seem to change every game–the winner knocks everyone else off the board. There is also a version involving coins. However, I always remind them that house rules are that any money that falls on the floor belongs to me, er, the house, and that’s why they switch to erasers.

Eventually, the bell rings and I go off to do this with another class in another room.