Who remembers their first day of kindergarten? I sure don’t,
but it’s safe to say that my teacher probably had each kid stand up, announce
his or her name, and say something about him or herself. (Five-year-old Calla
probably would’ve told you that her favorite color is red.) It usually wasn’t
much, but it was a little something to help your teacher and your new
classmates get to know you.
I did similar exercises whenever I found myself in an
organized group of relative strangers – mostly for summer camps. (At one church
camp, we were asked to give our names and our favorite Bible verse. I was
immediately branded a heathen when I said, “My name is Calla and… uh… I don’t
really have a favorite Bible verse.” GASP!)
These little activities are generally known as icebreakers.
Some are pretty basic (name, something about yourself) while others are much
more complex. It wasn’t until I got to college that I was introduced to the
true beauty of icebreakers.
Until that point, I saw them as a nuisance. Icebreakers had
mostly been done in groups of people I would almost certainly never see again
(honestly? most of the time, I was counting on it – have you met some of the
weirdos who go to church camps??), so why did I care who their favorite
Backstreet Boy was? Granted, I had a bad attitude: I never went to camp (be it
church camp or Norwegian camp) by choice, and I could think of thousands of
things I’d rather be doing.
Enter: the University of Minnesota, Morris. UMM has all of
its incoming freshmen spend one day there during the summer – they break you up
into groups, and you sit through some welcome sessions, register for classes,
and get campus tours. Then, when you show up for good in the fall, they have
freshman come a few days early and spend that time in “orientation groups”
where you travel around as a pack and do a bunch of activities to help you get
your mind off the fact that OH MY GOD MY PARENTS JUST LEFT ME AT COLLEGE AND
SUDDENLY I AM TERRIFIED.
Icebreakers were a big part of both of those sessions – but
they weren’t the lackluster icebreakers of my youth. These were COLLEGE
icebreakers –and you could be just about as crude as you wanted to.
Not that these games were always crude. The college
icebreakers were just more fun and more challenging than any icebreaker I’d
played before. Even the simple icebreakers were more fun because they turned
into a competition. I remember sitting in a giant circle with a bunch of total
strangers, and someone would start by saying their name and something that they
liked that started with the same letter of their name: my name is Calla and I
like caterpillars. (Which is true.) The next person would then say their name
and what they liked, plus the name and item of the person in front of them: my
name is Mona and I like meth. Her name is Calla and she likes caterpillars. The
next person would then have to repeat both of the names and items behind them:
my name is James and I like jam. Her name is Mona and she likes meth. Her name
is Calla and she likes caterpillars… and so on. The first person to screw up is
out of the game, and you keep going around until the best man wins. (Or until
you run out of time.)
Another game we played in our orientation groups was the
celebrity couple game. (Which, as you may imagine, only works with an even
number of people.) Everybody has a piece of paper stuck to their back – you
don’t know what name is stuck to you. You have to wander around asking yes or
no questions: you’re trying to figure out who you are, and you’re trying to
find your match. So if you approach someone, the first thing you might ask is,
“Am I a male?” He or she will look at the name on your back and answer
accordingly. You will look at the name on their back and answer questions that
they might have, but you also need to determine whether or not they’re a
potential match. For example: if you stroll up to someone who has the name Bert
fastened to their back, you would assume that their match is Ernie. If you know
that you are a male, you’d probably want to ask if you’re a fictional character
or if you have a stunning unibrow. If you know that you’re a female, it’s safe
to assume that Bert is not your match, but you would want to ask a question
about yourself all the same. (If you’re feeling adventuresome, you can include couples
that aren’t necessarily male and female, like gin and tonic or yin and yang.) The
ultimate goal is to find your other half, and while it’s not really a
competition, you don’t want to be the last idiot standing.
My other favorite icebreaker from orientation week was the
most complicated of all. This game requires paper, pencils, and a table. Every
person gets a piece of paper and a pencil, and each person either writes a
sentence or draws a picture. (You do it so it’s every other.) Then, you pass
your picture or your sentence on to the person next to you. If you get a piece
of paper with a sentence, you draw a picture of what’s going on in that
sentence. If you get a piece of paper with a picture, you write a sentence
about what you think is going on in that picture. When you’re done, you fold
the paper over so only your sentence or picture is visible. You pass it onto
the next person, and the cycle goes on from there. Once the pieces of paper
have made it full circle, you open them up and see just how far off the end
result was from the original. It’s like telephone, but on paper, and it never
fails to be completely hilarious.
Icebreakers were also a major part of college band camp. Oh
yeah: college band camp. (They called it a “retreat,” but we knew better.)
During one weekend each September, the UMM concert band packed up and went to a
church camp. The goal was to welcome new members and get a whole lot of
practicing in before the October homecoming concert.
The first night of band camp was the best night, because you
didn’t do any practicing and just played the shoe game for hours. The shoe game
requires a large space and a bunch of people willing to run around in their
socks. Everyone takes their shoes off and arranges them in a giant circle. You
remove one pair of shoes so that you’ll have one more person than you do pair
of shoes. Everyone stands behind a pair of shoes except for the lucky person
who is in the middle. The person in the middle of the circle tells you their
name and something about themselves: “My name is Calla, and I play the
clarinet.” Everyone who shares that in common with the person in the middle
must leave their space and run to a different pair of shoes – and the person in
the middle runs, too. There will be someone leftover because of the strategic
shoe shortage, and that person then stands in the middle and does the same
thing.
Unlike the other icebreakers, there really is no end to the
shoe game. You just quit when you feel like it – or when you’re winded from too
much running around while laughing hysterically. You learn a whole lot about
each other during the shoe game – almost certainly more than you want to, but
that’s absolutely the point. The shoe game is how we learned that our German
director was once a techno DJ and used to drink a pint of vodka each night
while in the German army.
Sadly, since college, there hasn’t been much of an
opportunity to play these ridiculous icebreakers. Maybe I should MAKE the opportunity. I don't have to wait until I'm tossed into a group of strangers: icebreakers are even more fun in groups of
people that you already know. You just never know what you're going to learn.
My director can drink more vodka than your director. |
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