Using our Tic-Tac-Toe Story Generator [instructions and template here], we can translate the game on this student's back into a poem:

A wish for experimental kisses,

unknowable              surprises,

the sun mysterious, shadowing.

(Photo from West Georgia's 1941 yearbook.)

In the farce Kid Curlers by Dorothy Waldo (1916), something that "looks like a game of tic-tac-toe" is mistaken for Japanese script.  (Spoiler: it's neither.)  We wondered which X- and O-like characters of katakana might make sense in a tic-tac-toe arrangement.  Here's what we came up with:

Reading right to left, up to down, we have a call for someone not to resign due to a particular circumstance:

ya me ro (stop)

ya me na (don't quit)

me na na (because of it)

Round kissing sun
Reassurance magnifying, shadowing
Marking the spot of one(ness)