The Fun Audit — a corporate inspection of whether you are enjoying your life
Two students, ten questions, and a straight face. One plays the auditor and reads from the checklist — have you watched a really good film in the last two months? had a proper laugh in the last twenty-four hours? told yourself “this is fun” in the last twelve? — and scores the answers. Halfway through they swap chairs. At the end the app issues a verdict in the language of a performance review: System Overload (Workaholic), The Balanced Engineer, or Chief Fun Officer.
The joke is the permission slip
Asking a class "how do you spend your free time?" produces the same four answers it has produced for decades. Wrapping the identical questions in an audit form changes the register and, with it, the honesty. The student is not confessing to a teacher, they are completing a compliance check, and the comic frame lets them admit that they have not read anything for pleasure in a year. That admission is where the interesting language starts.
The questions are present perfect, whatever the title says
Worth knowing before you plan the grammar around it. Every item on the checklist attaches an action to a period still running — in the last three weeks, in the last year — which is the present perfect's core use and one of the hardest things to teach Turkish speakers, because the equivalent structure does not map. Ten repetitions of the same pattern with a different time expression each time is better practice than a page of gap-fills, and nobody in the room notices it is practice.
Score first, discuss second
The five discussion questions that appear after the verdict are the actual lesson, and the audit is the warm-up that earns them. Do you agree with your title? What stops you having more fun — time, money or energy? Does fun always cost money? These work because both students now have a number and a label to react to. Running the discussion without the audit first would produce polite generalities; running it after produces disagreement about a specific result.
Give your partner the advice, not yourself
One of the five questions asks the student to look at their partner's score and prescribe one change. Keep that direction. Advice aimed at yourself stays vague and non-committal; advice aimed at someone sitting opposite you has to be specific enough to defend, and it produces the whole modal range — you should, you could try, why don't you — inside a real exchange rather than a substitution drill.
Come back to it a week later
The last question asks for one small promise for the coming weekend. Write those promises down. Open the next lesson by asking who kept theirs, and the activity acquires a second act built entirely on past simple reporting and excuse-making. It costs five minutes, needs no preparation, and turns a self-contained game into something the class remembers as a thread running between lessons.
Who it suits
A2 to B2, twenty to thirty minutes, and it needs an even number of students or a teacher willing to be audited. It works especially well with adults and working professionals, who recognise the audit format immediately and enjoy the parody — and who are also, reliably, the people most likely to score System Overload.
Goes well with
Further reading
Why Warm-Ups Matter — the first five minutes of a lesson
CEFR Levels Explained — what A1 to C2 actually mean in a classroom