ABC is for Another Bumper Crop . . . of Student Bloopers!

Every year, my mother assigns her seventh-grade students a massive final project: to create an illustrated ABC book reviewing all the world-history topics they studied that year.  The results have ranged from lovely, polished creations that were a pleasure to read to crumpled, sloppy messes full of outrageous errors.  This year, I was given the dubious honor of assigning grades to these year-end projects.  Since they were turned in only a few days before the end of the school year (the ones that came in on time, that is), I had to put in long hours around the clock to get them all done on time.  The work was not without its consolations, however; making things a little easier on my mother during the hectic days at year's end, for example, and assembling this marvelous collection of fractured historical facts, malapropisms, and delicious turns of language.

There's the alphabet, for starters.  Students only had to complete pages for 23 letters of the alphabet to get full credit, so they didn't really have to think of anything for, say, Q, X, and Z.  With all the topics covered over the course of the year, the other letters should have been easy.  Some students, however, chose to be a little more creative . . . and some . . . well . . .

A is for Age of Evolution
D is for Don't keep Roman slaves
D is for save your Drama for your Llama
F is for Fight Your Race
F is for how Fun llamas are
H is for Can Slaves Have Freedom?
J is for just another Middle Ages castle
K is for Knowing Llamas
N is for Most Renaissance Art was of Naked People
N is for No way did the Incas and Mayans have conquests
O is for Oh my god the medicine in the Middle Ages was horrible
O is for Ohh, Mayan Mystery
O is for Scientific Revolution
Q is for Aztec and Inca Con-Q-uest
R is for Really Poorly Drawn Hands
T is for tasting was not a very good idea in the Middle Ages
T is for the Incan llama
U is for hard to understand castles
X is for XL shields were not permitted
Y is for You
Z is for ZING!  It's NOT Martin Luther King!

Now, I present . . . the history of the world from ancient times to the Renaissance, according to seventh graders.  A few very minor modifications and additions have been made to improve the flow of the narrative, but the essence remains unchanged.

The early man is like the cavemen, well it is the cave man.  They were always said to be like outdoors and a type of animal.  They are explained to be look alikes of Tarzan.

The wealthy citizens of Rome were called patricians.  Baths, slaves, and entrapment is a life style of patrician citizens.  Romans built the Coliseum that was able to hold at least fifty thousand people with their own tools.  The coliseum had all/mostly some of the events.  With a very rigorous audience patricians enjoyed the entertainment or harsh humans getting attacked by monstrous beasts.  Gladiators would be going against people who were taller.  Patrician women took baths to the extreme.  They did not use soup like we do now but used oil to clean them.  All Roman people would lay and eat.  In marriages, people might feel a little bit anxious in Rome and some can feel so elated.  The parents of those couples feel very apprehensive but in Rome all parents must feel encouraged.

One important event that occurred during Roman times was the rise of Christianity.  One of the most known Christian stories is "Abraham's Ark."  The bible states that Jesus was born during Christmas.  Jesus' parents chose the same day celebrated by the Muslim so that while the Muslim celebrated they would not find the Jews celebrating the birth of Jesus.  Assertion is when Jesus went back to heave, as stated in the Bible.  Every single Christian has to be baptized because that's the way Christianity is.  Communion is a Jewish holiday.  Everyone has different opinions.  Mostly the Christians.

Another important world religion that developed a few hundred years after Christianity is Islam.  Muhammad would always succeed little and never big.  I think hajj is important because Muslims go to this especial ceremony and sacrifices every one of his or her life.  During the Muslim time, the Muslims themselves made man contributions, such as the astrolabe and anatomy.  A astrolabe is almost the same as a G.P.S. system.  Anatomy is when a dead body is cut open.

Meanwhile, several civilizations were thriving in the Western Hemisphere.  The Aztecs created fire and half sun.  The Aztecs were nice.  (later, in the same paper)  The Aztecs were mean.  The captured ruler agreed to pay gold or silver for prison cell.  Mayans gave us chocolate, because even today in my life everybody loves chocolate.  I would also say that the Incas are interesting too, but my opinion is that I don't really find the Incas very interesting.  The Incas used llamas.  The llama was a type of delicious.  Everything about a llama was big.

Civilization was thriving in Asia, too.  China had one of the earliest times of humans.

In Africa, salt was worth its weight in gold.  Back then they didn't have all the technology that we have now to discover if something is really worth a fortune.  If the people from back then knew that gold was worth what it's worth now, they probably wouldn't have wasted it like they did.

The Middle Ages followed the fall of Rome.  All towns often burned down.  During this time the town wanted to go back to Europe.    This was the era of feudalism, with sharp distinctions between king and peasant.  In every castle there would always be some kind of treasure that you couldn't find anywhere but right then in that castle.  The life of a present was harder than anyone else because the average present had to perform many chores in their homes.  Medieval people had some weird ideas about food.  Most wealthy foods are mostly from the sky.  Closest to hell was the vegetables.

Do you remember when you were a little kid running around with pieces of cardboard on your body to protect yourself from getting hit by those plastic Bee-bee guns you would buy from the ice-cream truck?  That's what medieval armor was like.  Armors are very sharp.  Little kids should not be allowed to play with them.  Of course, the ancient Romans had armor too.  Both are structurally the same except that Romans went in completely naked.  During wars the knights will wear a big facial armor on body in order to protect him.  They also used some knights with solid hammer-head that can knock out a man in armor.  Knight Battles were very dangerous for the horses.  People threw stuff and killed you.  One example of medieval weaponry is the modern gun.  The Crusades were a series of notorious wars of the Middle Ages.  The crusaders were sent to the Holly Land.

People have died in the shivering streets, smelling the decomposed skin.  You may hear of the Black Death and you might know or not if your village may get it or not.  The Black Death is a horrible plague that we can stop by getting rid of rats, fleas, and traders that can be trading your health for diseased fleas.  Avoid church bells.  When I think of this disease I feel my body tingle.  All three types of plague are very dead.  The plague was high fevers, sweating, death unattended, shocks, and non-enjoyable moments in life.  The symptoms keep getting bigger and bigger.  In people's houses all there was were high fevers.  If you had the disease, no one would want to be around you, you would also begin to smell like a trash can full of dead things.  There is a problem with poor people wanting to live their life before they die, so it ends up causing so much trouble.  The only people who acted weird for the plague or the bubonic plague, were the Muslims and the Christians also.  Panicking is like the number one thing in the world right now.  I understand that people think Jews are witchcraft, but do you rather be died or be witchcraft.  Unfortunately, medieval medical practices weren't much help.  Back in the middle ages doctors thought that simple reamers would solve everything.  Doctors spent most of their time studying urine.  In Africa and the middle ages many people died because most of the treatments were made by plants made by themselves.  When people died and went to heaven and they saw the three plants they would say "that's what made us sick."

Luther was nowhere to be found.  (Yes, this was the first sentence of one student's page on the great religious reformer.)  Luther's scariness led him to think God as a God of mercy.  Luther was going to make the church look better from the inside and also look better from the outside.

King Henry VIII was another important figure in the Reformation.  He was a very attracted man.  He was married to six women, after a divorce the king might behead them (cut their head) and save the body.  In a way he was an excellent king.  He was married to six wives such as Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Howard, and Katherine Parr.  Anne of Cleves had a number of monks and had devotion.  The last wife survived from being beheaded.  Henry's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, became queen after his death.  Through the months Mary thought she was pregnant, Mary died of childbirth, after the false of the pregnancy.  Elizabeth was born in September 7, 2010.  During the Elizabethan era, women would always dress like they were going to a party.  Men didn't dress over the top like women did.

Shakespeare went to London to become a player in a glob.  Sometimes she would want him to play on her place to entrain the queen.  Sometimes men played parts of a woman in the plays.  What William also saw an execution where they chop a humans head in front of a town or a village.  Some parts of life were mysterious like melted up in the air.  Teasing the bares was a type of entertainment.

The arts thrived during the Renaissance.  To the Greeks and Romans, the subject of art was ordinary art.  Renaissance art was used to worship.  It was about nudity.  Today, if we were to see art with nudity of course some would be immature.  Back during the renaissance, nudity was beautiful.  Renaissance art was mainly Jesus, education, and importance.  Some of the artist will be Leonardo da Vinci and Van Ike.  Nowadays teenagers get in a habit of doing drugs when beautiful art is around earth.

Have you ever seen someone give a person a nickname just because they are handsome?  Leonardo da Vinci was a guy that was very handsome during his time of being a teenager.  He always will be happy.  Leonardo was somewhat the type of person that pulled planks.  Although you may think, with all Leonardo could do, he wouldn't be into partying.  Most of us think of geniuses as a no-fun zone kind of personality.  Leonardo also grew to become famous because he invented fish paint balls.  He even signed a universe.  All he wanted to do was make sense to the world.

Do you know a person who is a mathematician from the Age of Discovery?  Back in the Middle Ages, people would get stuck in science, but came back in the renaissance.  Then everybody stared inventing and discovering newt things.  They had lost the scientific revolution.  But then they found it.  Now they are ready to go on into the future.  The last stage of the scientific method is interpreting the revolt.  Galileo looked at his telescope and it didn't match.  Galileo said that the two balls would drop at the same time.  He was right.  Galileo also believed that all objects fall at the same time.  Successfully he was right and he smiled.

People exploded because they wanted to find different ways to travel faster and just wanted to trade.  They traded plants, foods, animals, and various types of deadly diseases.  When Henry the navigator died a man named Portuguese rounded up Africa's south tip then called Christopher Columbus who went and found America, but took him a long time to notice.  Some things that went to America were many fruits.

Clearly, all of these inputs had made great outputs.  And that's the history of the world, according to seventh graders.

So, did they actually learn anything?  I think the lessons of history can best be summed up by the following:

If you want to learn about a type of culture and how they live so then do the research on them and don't think that it will be weird.

Most importantly, these young scholars learned what really matters in the educational system:

Teachers are very wonderful but they can't expect every thing they wanted like if they write a definition of a word and put it in a key to explain what the thing is.  They will say it's "PLAGIARISM."  Yeah, that's right.  Every thing you do that you copy is plagiarism.  Yeah its wrong to do that but if it's a definition that's different.