The World According to Student Bloopers

"The World According to Student Bloopers"
by Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
 

NOTE: You will need to have at least some knowledge of the Bible stories and the history of mankind 
to understand all of this.
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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 (in two 
parts) from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, 
from eighth grade through college freshman level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.
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The inhabitants of Ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled 
by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so areas 
of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge t
riangular cube. The Pyramids 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, once 
asked, “Am I my brother’s son?” God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of 
Isaac, stole his brother’s birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his 12 sons to be patriarchs, 
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. Afterward, Moses went up on Mount 
Cyanide to get the 10 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. Solomn, 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. 
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 Athens was democratic 
because 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 neighbours were doing. When they fought with 
the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.
 

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in 
one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. 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. Nero was a cruel tyranny 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 Harold mustarded his troops before the battle of Hastings. Joan of Arc was canonized by Bernard 
Shaw and victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no 
free man should be hanged twice for the same offence.
 

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who 
wrote many poems and verses 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 the 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 money and is famous 
only for his plays. He lived at 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 attaching his manhood. Romeo and 
Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel 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 this was called the Pilgrim’s Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, 
they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war 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 parcels 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 Martha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Then 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 wrote the Gettysburg address while travelling 
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 
theatre and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was 
John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly 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 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 naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl 
Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.
 

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