Paper Football!

I'm not sure how it came up this morning in the coffee shop, but my friend Nigel (who's 24) mentioned paper football ...

[... I just remembered! I'd slid over toward him (he's a barista) the Reserved sign they put on my table each morning--and the move had reminded him of the game ...]

... and it all came whooshing back to me, that schoolroom, desktop game involving a piece of folded paper. Each kid took turns sliding it toward the other, the object to make it reach the opposite edge of the desk and to extend over the edge.  Touchdown! Then the kid on whom the touchdown was just scored would make "goalposts" with his fingers, and the extra point would come as the other player would prop up the "football" with one finger, then flick it with a finger on the other hand toward the "goalpost" ...

When I was a middle school teacher (1966-78, 1982-97), I saw this game all the time (never, of course, when I was teaching about indirect objects! no, only at, you know, lunch or something), and, until this morning, I had completely forgotten about it.

I checked the Web and YouTube ... jammed with things about the game. Lots of videos. Here's a link to one about how to play the game.

Later this morning, I remembered an Elizabethan game I sometimes taught my 8th graders when we were spending some time with Shakespeare and The Taming of the Shrew (or, later, Much Ado About Nothing)--an Elizabethan game called "slide-thrift." or "shove-groat." Below is a copy of the rules I gave the kids.

A couple of years I arranged an 8th-grade Slide-Thrift Tournament at lunch; I still have a list of kids who participated one year--31 boys, 32 girls. I didn't write down the winners--but I think they got pizza or something. Some of those names made me smile, by the way: They're now Facebook friends! They were in the Aurora High Class of 1999, so I had them in 94-95 in 8th grade.

Anyway, paper football always intrigued me, and I was a bit jealous that my students had a game like that. Back in my own junior high years, all we had was homework and fistfights. I generally lost both of them.

PS--I suggested to Nigel that the coffee shop organize a big Paper Football Tournament--call it the Paper Bowl?

*the picture at the head of this post, by the way, is from a 3-D game app you can get from Amazon--link to it.