Today’s text­book topic was Valentine’s Day, so when else was I going to sim­u­late a dat­ing show for my students?

I started things off with a (benign?) task: write the pro­file for the ideal man (my pre­cept had all female stu­dents). Stu­dents were required to give cer­tain attrib­utes, such as occu­pa­tion, age, zodiac sign, etc, but they were given more free rein when it came to devis­ing the man’s life story. As they worked, I walked around the room, look­ing at the per­son­al­i­ties being pulled out of thin air, occa­sion­ally catch­ing a glimpse of some­thing like “Job: Engineer/Architect/Lawyer”. A very busy man, to be sure.

I then revealed that the pro­files would act an aid while we watched some episodes of a new dat­ing show: Fatal Flaw. For each episode, three of the girls would pre­tend to be men—their ideal men, to be exact—while one of the girls would por­tray her­self, try­ing to find an eli­gi­ble bach­e­lor to date. The girl would inter­view the “men”, ask­ing them sim­ple ques­tions. How­ever, there was a twist: before the episode, I took the three “men” out into the hall­way and assigned them each a “fatal flaw”. Some examples:

- cries when­ever he eats tofu

- calls his mother every hour

- col­lects Xi Yangyang dolls

- has hooks for hands

After inter­view­ing the men, the girl was informed of the three flaws, but she was never told who had which flaw. This left her with a bit of a gam­ble (and in one of the episodes, Mr. Hooks For Hands was the lucky man). How­ever, she had plenty of other qual­i­ties to judge the men on.

Some mem­o­rable moments:

Girl: What are you good at?

“Guy”: I remem­ber both my mother’s and my father’s birthday.

Girl: What is your job?

“Guy”: I am a boss. I am a big boss.

Girl: What is your hobby?

“Guy”: Tak­ing care of you, of course!

- Cameron