IJMC - Your History Lesson For Today Is...

...remarkably similar to the one I was taught. With a few differences. -dave




                The World According to Student Bloopers

                             Richard Lederer
                            St. Paul's School

    One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher
is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay.  I
have pasted together the following "history" of the world from
certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout
the United States, from eighth grade through college level.  Read
carefully, and you will learn a lot.

    The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies.  They lived in the
Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.  The climate of the Sarah is
such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of
the dessert are cultivated by irritation.  The Egyptians built the
Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube.  The Pramids are a
range of mountains between France and Spain.

    The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.  In the first book
of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?"  God asked
Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma.  Jacob, son of Issac,
stole his brother's birthmark.  Jacob was a partiarch who brought up
his twelve sons to be partiarchs, but they did not take to it.  One of
Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

    Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw.
Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which
is bread made without any ingredients.  Afterwards, Moses went up on
Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments.  David was a Hebrew king
skilled at playing the liar.  He fought with the Philatelists, a race
of people who lived in Biblical times.  Solomon, one of David's sons,
had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

    Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history.  The Greeks invented
three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric and Ironic.  They also had
myths.  A myth is a female moth.  One myth says that the mother of
Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable.
Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer.  Homer also wrote the
"Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured
on his journey.  Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by
another man of that name.

    Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people
advice.  They killed him.  Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

    In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the
biscuits, and threw the java.  The reward to the victor was a coral
wreath.  The government of Athen was democratic because the people
took the law into their own hands.  There were no wars in Greece, as
the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what
their neighbors were doing.  When they fought the Parisians, the
Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

    Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks.  History call people
Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.  At Roman
banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair.  Julius Caesar
extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul.  The Ides of March
killed him because they thought he was going to be made king.  Nero
was a cruel tyrany who would torture his poor subjects by playing the
fiddle to them.

    Then came the Middle Ages.  King Alfred conquered the Dames, King
Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops
before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George
Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their
necks.  Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be
hanged twice for the same offense.

    In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.  The greatest
writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and
also wrote literature.  Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot
an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.

    The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the
value of their human being.  Martin Luther was nailed to the church
door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences.  He died a horrible
death, being excommunicated by a bull.  It was the painter Donatello's
interest in the female nude that made him the father of the
Renaissance.  It was an age of great inventions and discoveries.
Gutenberg invented the Bible.  Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical
figure because he invented cigarettes.  Another important invention
was the circulation of blood.  Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world
with a 100-foot clipper.

    The government of England was a limited mockery.  Henry VIII found
walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee.  Queen
Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen."  As a queen she was a success.  When
Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted
"hurrah."  Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

    The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear.
Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his
plays.  He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies,
comedies and errors.  In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet
rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy.
In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by
attacking his manhood.  Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic
couplet.  Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes.
He wrote "Donkey Hote".  The next great author was John Milton.
Milton wrote "Paradise Lost."  Then his wife died and he wrote
"Paradise Regained."

    During the Renaissance America began.  Christopher Columbus was a
great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the
Atlantic.  His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa
Fe.  Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and the was called the
Pilgrim's Progress.  When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were
greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their was hoops
before them.  The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back.  Many
of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which
proved very fatal to them.  The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the
settlers.  Many people died and many babies were born.  Captain John
Smith was responsible for all this.

    One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put
tacks in their tea.  Also, the colonists would send their pacels
through the post without stamps.  During the War, Red Coats and Paul
Revere was throwing balls over stone walls.  The dogs were barking and
the peacocks crowing.  Finally, the colonists won the War and no
longer had to pay for taxis.

    Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented
Congress.  Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two
singers of the Declaration of Independence.  Franklin had gone to
Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread
under each arm.  He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and
declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died
in 1790 and is still dead.

    George Washington married Matha Curtis and in due time became the
Father of Our Country.  Them the Constitution of the United States was
adopted to secure domestic hostility.  Under the Constitution the
people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

    Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent.  Lincoln's
mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built
with his own hands.  When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall
silk hat.  He said, "In onion there is strength."  Abraham Lincoln
write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to
Gettysburg on the back of an envelope.  He also signed the
Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the
ex-Negroes citizenship.  But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and
lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims.  On the night of
April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat
by one of the actors in a moving picture show.  The believed assinator
was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor.  This ruined Booth's
career.

    Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time.
Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called "Candy".
Gravity was invented by Issac Walton.  It is chiefly noticeable in the
Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.

    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.  Bach died from 1750 to the present.  Beethoven wrote music
even though he was deaf.  He was so deaf he wrote loud music.  He took
long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him.
Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

    France was in a very serious state.  The French Revolution was
accomplished before it happened.  The Marseillaise was the theme song
of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon.  During the
Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their
shoes.  Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped
at Napoleon's flanks.  Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and
was very tense and unrestrained.  He wanted an heir to inherit his
power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear him any
children.

    The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire
is in the East and the sun sets in the West.  Queen Victoria was the
longest queen.  She sat on a thorn for 63 years.  Her reclining years
and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great
personality.  Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

    The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and
thoughts.  The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers
to spring up.  Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did
the work of a hundred men.  Samuel Morse invented a code for
telepathy.  Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis.  Charles
Darwin was a naturailst who wrote the "Organ of the Species".  Madman
Curie discovered radium.  And Karl Marx became one of the Marx
Brothers.

    The First World War, cause by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by
a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.