“Mr. Jacobs, who do you think will win the Super Bowl?” asked my homeroom students. “The Giants or the Patriots?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really been into soccer.”
“It’s not soccer–it’s football!” they protested, their mouths dropping open while they whispered to each other, “You mean he doesn’t even know–?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, still. I’ve never really seen the point of running around while bouncing a ball and trying to throw it through a little metal hoop.”
One girl in particular could barely close her mouth enough to stare at me intently and ask, “Are you serious?”
I confessed that I wasn’t, but since my classes had just read Roald Dahl’s Television–and I am convinced by every word of it and preached to them accordingly–I just might have been able to play it up a little longer and had them all believing in my weird out-of-touchedness.
But they probably already believe that anyway.
