There’s one in every class.
A child who’s just brilliant, who looks at things a bit differently, whose philosophical musings will likely mean they’ll stand out from (and maybe won’t fit in with) their peers as they grow up and even throughout adulthood.
It looks like one teacher has pinpointed which of his pupils that is thanks to an interesting exchange in his classroom.
Bret Turner, who teaches first graders (typically 6 and 7-year-olds) at a school in California, shared this riddle with his class this week.
His answer, in case you were wondering, is the letter ‘e’, though Bret got a far more intellectual answer from one of the children in the class.
“The first guess from one of my 1st graders was ‘death’ and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the moment,” he wrote on Twitter.
The first guess from one of my 1st graders was “death” and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the moment pic.twitter.com/7sYFxHNcZk
— Bret Turner (@bretjturner) January 2, 2018
He’s right too – the letter ‘e’ seems like a crap answer after that.
“Before I finally revealed the ‘correct’ answer to the riddle, to a largely unimpressed audience, I fielded other guesses that continued along a similarly existential vein,” Bret continued in the Twitter thread.
“There was ‘NOT everything’, ‘all stuff’, ‘the end’, and maybe my favourite, ‘nothingthing’.”
Following the success of the tweet, he said he also planned on telling the kids that they’d gone viral.
“Given their facility with the internets, I expect their response will be ‘sure but did it go SUPERviral’ and ‘just how many retweets are we talking about here’ and ‘can I go to the bathroom’.”
