Be afraid.

So the other day my grade 7 English class had to talk about superstitions. All the usual ones came out (and a couple of unusual ones -- did you know that in Denmark on Halloween, they hide all the brooms so that witches can't come along and steal them? Cool) and then the students had to draw a picture of their favourite superstition.

One student came up with an elegantly rendered picture of a hat: it was black, possibly a fedora, with a lovely little flower on the side.

"What is that?" I asked, unsure if I'd ever heard the superstition about fedoras. My poor student looked confused.

"We just talked about it, teacher," he said. "If it crosses your path you get bad luck -- it's a black hat!"

I could not make this stuff up.