Necessity is commonly held to be the mother of invention, and so it was for a group of 1st graders at Carbon Hill (Ala.) Elementary School faced with a fill-in-the-blanks exercise testing their literary acumen.
In preparation for a recent open house, Judy Frazier presented her class with a list of incomplete proverbs for which the students had to come up with endings.
The creative-thinking assignment resulted in novel sayings that might well rival the originals.
Among the expressions that were given new meaning was Mandy Vick’s observation that no news is ... “boring.” Jeffrey Stough, apparently a confirmed capitalist, said that money is the root of “the United States,” while Nathan Trimble, perhaps making a case for the right to privacy, noted that people who live in glass houses “shouldn’t get seen using the bathroom.”
Ryan Sandlin, clearly a sensitive 1st grader, said sticks and stones might break his bones, “but hugs won’t,” and his classmate Ashley Patton indicated an understanding of the realities of aging when she wrote that you can teach an old dog to “do a lot of things, but not have babies.”
And Samantha Hamilton, exhibiting an astute awareness of monetary reality, stated an unfortunate truth when she observed that a penny saved is “just one cent and that’s not much.”
--jw
