Here are a few phrases and facts the children did not recognize this week, leading me to believe that you need to explain EVERYTHING to anyone younger than thirty:
1) my wife's fifth graders (and all the young teachers in proximity to my wife's classroom) did not know the phrase "up the creek without a paddle," and I said most people say "up shit's creek without a paddle," thus the name of the popular sitcom—and my wife did not realize the show was named after the idiom . . . so everyone learning some stuff;
2) Cunningham's senior classes did not know the phrase "carbon-based life form," probably because they did not grow up watching Star Trek;
3) my seventy-five senior English students—aside from one or two kids—had not heard of the "Spanish Armada," nor did they know that Queen Elizabeth defeated this massive fleet of bellicose Catholics;
now I am sure that the young folks know plenty of important things that I don't know, delulu Labubu kind of stuff, so I'm not casting any stones (and for you young people, that phrase comes from the New Testament, when some old-timey people wanted to stone a woman to death, and Jesus said, "He that is without sin, cast the first stone," and this persuasive tactic actually worked and all these old-timey sinners walked away, and then the phrase evolved to "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," and there's also a Billy Joel album titled Glass Houses).
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