No one expected this English lesson to take such a dark turn
When you get frustrated because you can't solve a riddle, you'll say almost anything.
Children have this uncanny ability to come up with the most incredible, unexpected answers to simple questions.
Bret Turner, a teacher in California, saw this ability shine in one of his students, who came up with quite a sombre response to a popular riddle.
Before revealing the answer, Bret took guesses from the class.
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Bret reported feeling quite awestruck when one of the children guessed that the answer might be "death".
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
It seems Bret's class is full of precocious children:
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. There was "NOT everything," "all stuff," "the end," and maybe my favorite, "nothingthing."
— Bret Turner (@bretjturner) January 3, 2018
The boy's first answer was incorrect, but it was not without merit. It showed a kind of wisdom that we don't expect to hear from very young children, proving that they often understand much more about life than we give them credit for.