Winning the Pullet Suprise

On a test, an English teacher in Chickasha, Oklahoma, asked her students, "What distinguished writing award did Harper Lee win for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird ?" One student wrote, "Harper Lee won the Pullet Surprise". Each of the following student bloopers is indeed worthy of a pullet surprise. Only in the classroom can you discover that Victor Hugo wrote Lame is Rob and that another famous French writer, Emily Zola, penned a famous letter entitled J'acuzzi. Leave it to our young scholars to inform us that Albert Campus authored The Plaque and that Robert Browning shows his lighter side in "The Pied Piper of Hamlet". American lit. is relit with facts that Ernest Hemingway crafted For Whom the Belt Holds , that John Steinbeck created My Cement, that J.D. Salinger gave the world Catch Her in the Rye. Did you know that Anonymous is the man who writes all the poems that are not signed?

Mount Olympus might erupt with laughter on hearing the way students describe the gods and goddesses. Hera had only one way to control Zeus and viewed sex as a means of coming to an end. The Greek goddess of love was Alpodite. Aphrodite lives on today as a kind of haircut - the Aphro. Vesta was the goddess who kept the home fries burning. Dionysius was the god of rivalry. Bacchus first taught the Greeks to get drunk. The messenger god was named Herpes, while the god of metalworking was hepatitus. Persephone was a girl who had an on-and-off relationship with Pluto. Students render - and rend - classical mythology with unintended, classic humor. Many a young scholar has defined a myth as 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 Ilaid, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope is the last hardship that Odysseus endures on his journey. Odysseus is one of many heroes in ancient iniquity. While Odysseus is off sleeping with goddesses, Penelope has to stay at home and beat off all those suitors. When Odysseus comes home in disguise, his old nurse recognizes him by his scared thigh, which he gets from a wild bore. Odysseus has to sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Being between Scylla and Charybdis means whichever way you go, you are going to get got. Sophocles wrote the famous Greek play Oedipus Wrecks. Oedipus screws up very badly when he marries his own mother who was really his wife, which Erkel knew all along. Oepidus forces out his eyes and condoms himself. Oedipus and hamlet really had a lot in common, even if Freud had not yet been invented.

The creator of Hamlet was, of course, William Shakespeare. Through their bloopers, many generations of students have gone from bad to verse:

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William J. Shakespeare. Shakespeare was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. His father was Mr. Shakespeare, and his mother was Mrs. Shakespeare. He wrote during the era in which he lived. Actually Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare but by another man named Shakespeare. Shakespeare never made much money and is famous only because of his plays and sonics. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing hysterectomies, tragedies, comedies and errors. I don't see why he is so popular when his writing skills are so low. He wrote in Islamic pentameter, and you can't hardly understand what he is saying. In one of Shakespeare's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. A soliloquy is a conversation between one person. Hamlet has an edible complex, and his mind is filled with the filfth of incestuous sheets which he pours over every time he sees his mother. Hamlet decides to act madly so he gets in an antic position.

In Act Five, Hamlet talks to Horatio about a skull that has been thrown up. Act Five comes right after Act Four. From its earliest beginnings to the present day, the canon of English and American literature gets reamed in the classroom:

• Caedmon composed simple hymns in praise of God, using his ceramic tool.
• Edgar Allan Poe was a very curdling writer. He had several additions. One of his additions was alcohol.
• Mr. Murdstone treated David Copperfield's mother like a very terranical mail shovenist.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, while his parents were travelling abroad.
• And finally: Suicide was a way of life for Hemingway.