Picking a class mascot or team names without an argument

The draw is not the hard part. The hard part is what you say before and after it.

Choosing a class mascot, a team name or a project animal is a small decision that can take twenty minutes and end with two students not speaking. The usual cause is not the animals; it is that the process was invented while it was already running. This page is a procedure you can run in five minutes, plus the four moments where it usually goes wrong.

The procedure

  1. Decide the pool before anyone is watching. All animals, one group, or a pasted list of ten. Write it on the board so it is not negotiable later.
  2. Count the groups. Six teams means six draws. Do them in one sitting, in front of the class, in order.
  3. Turn unique results on. This guarantees no two teams get the same animal, which removes the most common complaint before it happens.
  4. Draw one at a time and write each result down. Team one gets the first result, team two the second, and so on. Do not draw all six and then allocate them — the allocation is where the argument starts.
  5. Announce the rule for swaps before the first draw. Either swaps are allowed for two minutes after the draw, or they are not allowed at all. Both work. Deciding afterwards does not.

Total time: under five minutes, including writing the six names on the board.

The four moments it goes wrong

1. Someone rerolls because their animal is "boring"

Every pool contains animals that a group of students will find dull: a mussel, a nematode, a common frog. The way to prevent this is not to remove them from the pool; it is to make the animal into a task. A team that draws a mussel and has to defend it as a mascot — what does a mussel stand for, what is its slogan, why is it a good choice — will produce better work than a team that draws a wolf, because the wolf does the work for them.

2. Two teams want the same animal

This only happens when unique results is off, or when the pool is smaller than the number of teams. Check the count first: six teams need at least six entries, and a pool of five will produce a repeat no matter what the switch says.

3. The pool is too narrow and everyone gets a variation of the same animal

Set the pool to "birds" with six teams and you may get six small songbirds. That is not a bug, but it makes for a dull set of team names. If you want variety, use all animals or paste a deliberately mixed list: one mammal, one bird, one reptile, one fish, one insect, one mollusc.

4. The result is announced before it is written down

Six draws announced from memory will be misremembered by the third one, and the correction will look like a fix. Write each result on the board as it appears, in the order it appears.

Turning an animal into a team name

Once the animal is drawn, the name is a five-minute task if you give it a shape. Three formats work for almost any animal:

A caution on collective nouns: a few of them are obscure enough that students will assume you invented them. Check the one you use, or say plainly that you are not sure and let the class look it up. The lookup is a better use of two minutes than the name.

For a whole-school or year-group draw

The same procedure scales if you keep the record. Draw for each class in order, write the results into one list, and publish the list where everyone can see it. A published list ends the "I heard class 4 got the eagle" conversation, which is the version of this problem that takes a week to settle.

One practical note: if the draw is for something that lasts a year — a mascot, a house name — do it once and keep the result. Redrawing halfway through the year because a group has gone off their animal is the fastest way to make the next draw meaningless.

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