[628 words]
History According to Schoolchildren
The following excerpts are actual answers given on history tests and in Sunday School quizzes by children between 5th and 6th grade ages in Ohio. They were collected by two teachers over a period of three years.
- Ancient Egypt was old. It was inhabited by gypsies and mummies who all wrote in hydraulics.They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
- Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandos. He died before he ever reached Canada but the commandos made it.
- Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines. He was an actual hysterical figure as well as being in the Bible. It sounds like he was sort of busy too.
- The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a young female moth.
- Socrates was a famous old Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. He later died from an overdose of wedlock which is apparently poisonous. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
- Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out “Same to you, Brutus.”
- Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw for reasons I don’t really understand. The English and French still have problems.
- It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
- Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper which was very dangerous to all his men.
- Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.
- Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf that he wrote loud music and became the father of rock and roll. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
The Silent Treatment
A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each other the silent treatment.
Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 AM for an early morning business flight.
Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and lose), he wrote o n a piece of paper, “Please wake me at 5:00 AM.” He left it where he knew she would find it.
The next morning, the man woke up, only y to discover it was 9:00 AM and he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t wakened him, when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.
The paper said, “It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.”
More Silent Treatment
A couple drove down a country road for several miles, not saying a word. An earlier discussion had led to an argument and neither of them wanted to concede their position. As they passed a barnyard of mules, goats, and pigs, the husband asked sarcastically, “Relatives of yours?”
“Yep,” the wife replied, “in-laws.”