Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (30 page)

Albert Einstein dropped out of high school when he was 16 because he felt that the school he was attending in Germany was too strict. Even earlier, some teachers had suggested that he quit grade school. Albert had a speech impediment, so his parents and teachers worried he might be “backward.” Later, of course, he went on to college, became a world-famous physicist and lecturer, and was even offered the job of president of Israel. (He declined.)

OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD

Thomas Edison was kicked out of school at the age of seven—just three months after he enrolled. His teacher called him unruly and slow, so his parents homeschooled him. But he went on to invent the phonograph, perfect the lightbulb, and receive 1,093 U.S. patents, making him one of the most prolific inventors in history. Edison invented so many things that a newspaper reporter nicknamed him the “Wizard of Menlo Park” (the New Jersey town where he lived).

Minimum length of time that food stays in the large intestine: 10 hours.

IT’S BURGERS FOR YOU!

When he was 15, Dave Thomas had a job as a restaurant busboy in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His parents were moving, but he wanted to stay in Fort Wayne, so Thomas quit school and moved in with the restaurant’s owners. He later moved on to executive-level jobs at Kentucky Fried Chicken and became a millionaire at the age of 35. Then he founded the fast-food restaurant Wendy’s. Dave Thomas finally got his GED (a high school diploma) when he was 61 years old. But he spent almost his entire working life in the fast-food industry…though he hired other people—about 40,000 of them—to do the actual burger flipping.

THE TECHIE DROPOUT CLUB

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University in 1975. He’d been a pre-law student, but actually spent most of his time fiddling with the machines in the school’s computer center. He finally left school because a childhood friend (and fellow college dropout) named Paul Allen convinced him to try his hand at running a little computer company that they called Microsoft.

Another tech millionaire also left school in 1975: Steve Wozniak dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley and went on to found the computer company Apple Inc. with Steve Jobs (who had dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College). Wozniak eventually went back to Berkeley. Using the pseudonym “Rocky Raccoon Clark,” he got an electrical engineering/computer science degree in 1986.

Q: What are the Mega Society and Triple Nine Society?
A: Like Mensa, they’re societies for people with super-high IQ scores.

See if you can stump your teacher with these jokes.

Q.
What did the lips say to the eyes?

A.
Between you and me, something smells.

Q.
Where does January come after February?

A.
In the dictionary.

Q.
Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?

A.
He had no guts.

Q.
Why did all the students eat their homework?

A.
The teacher said the questions were a piece of cake.

Q.
Who invented airplanes that didn’t fly?

A.
The Wrong brothers.

Q.
Why was the computer so chilly?

A.
He forgot to close his Windows.

Can you find all the forbidden things that we’ve hidden in the grid to the right? (Remember, when you report to detention, leave the whoopee cushion at home.)

BAD LANGUAGE

BEING RUDE

BURPING REALLY LOUD

EATING IN CLASS

FARTING FREQUENTLY

KICKING

LAUNCHING SPITBALLS

PINCHING

PULLING PIGTAILS

SNORING IN CLASS

SPITTING

STEALING LUNCHES

TALKING ON CELL

TELLING FIBS

THROWING NOTEBOOK

The granite of Mount Rushmore erodes at the rate of one inch every 10,000 years.

Answers on
page 243
.

In case your teacher asks: Thailand is divided into 75 provinces.

Adults are always saying, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know!” But that’s not actually true…about paper money, anyway. Here’s the history of the kind of money that
does
come from trees.

T
HAT’LL BE 20 SHELLS

Before there was money, people used the barter system—they just traded goods and services with each other. The first actual money came along around 1000 BC, when people living along the coastlines of the Indian and Pacific oceans started trading small shells called cowries for services and supplies. Eventually, people switched from shells to precious metals: gold, silver, bronze, and copper became the standards by which people judged the value of things.

FLYING MONEY

Meanwhile, the Chinese invented paper sometime around AD 100. About 700 years later, there was a copper shortage, so the Chinese emperor decided to substitute decorated pieces of paper, or banknotes, for coins.

Don’t forget to celebrate End of the Middle Ages Day on May 29.

The banknotes represented different amounts of copper and silver and could be exchanged for the precious metals. To make them, the Chinese harvested trees and pressed the wood into pieces of rectangular paper; the larger the rectangle, the more money it was worth. People mostly used the paper money to buy goods from faraway places because messengers could carry the paper more easily than bags of coins, and could “fly” (or at least ride horses really fast) across the countryside with the paper notes. So the Chinese called the paper banknotes “flying money.”

MARCO! POLO!

In the 13th century, the explorer Marco Polo visited China. When he got back to Italy, people had a hard time believing his stories of the Chinese paper money. At that time, Europeans used gold and silver coins. To them, paper didn’t have any value. When Marco Polo suggested that Europe should consider paper money, people laughed at him.

Finally, in 1657, a few Europeans changed their minds. That year, Sweden founded a national bank, managed by the government. The bank’s director, Johan Palmstruch, started issuing paper money instead of handing out coins. That worked fine for a while, but by 1664, people had figured out that Palmstruch was printing more banknotes than there were coins in the bank to cover them. That caused a mass panic: the bank collapsed, and Palmstruch went to jail for the rest of his life.

In Chinese culture, it’s taboo to disfigure a picture of sculpture of a dragon.

But paper money had taken hold in Europe. It was lightweight and easy to produce. And people who had once carried around heavy coins could now fold up pieces of paper in their pockets instead.

COMING TO AMERICA

Banknotes traveled to the New World with the European colonists. In 1690, Massachusetts was the first area to start using paper money, and eventually all of the colonies followed.

But the different colonies used different kinds of money. So in 1781, during the American Revolution, the Continental Congress (which was in charge of the colonies at the time) opened a national bank: the Bank of North America. And in 1791, after the new country had been officially formed, Congress created a single currency for the United States and issued paper bank-notes that made it easy to buy and sell goods from state to state.

These days, banknotes are found all over the world. American dollars, euros, Japanese yen—they’re all made from some kind of paper, which is usually comes from trees. But today’s U.S. dollars are actually made from a mixture of cotton and linen to make them durable and harder to rip…so, technically, they grow on plants.

In Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
, no one ever mentions Count Dracula’s first name.

Imagine this: It’s lunchtime and your teacher has cafeteria duty. You call her over, offer a tasty snack, and pull out…bugs! Well, not really. They’re candy. But here’s how to make them.

DIRECTIONS

•
Line your cookie sheet with wax paper.

•
Place 12 caramels onto the wax paper and press them with your hand so they’re shaped like small ovals.

Only two mammals lay eggs: the duck-billed platypus and the spiny echidna.

•
Now it’s time to cut the licorice whips into 48 small pieces. (We know it’s annoying, but be sure to get your parents’ permission before you do any cutting or cooking.)

•
Press four pieces of licorice into the sides of each caramel to make legs.

•
Put a second caramel on top of each “bug” and press it into an oval shape again. To make sure the legs stay put, be sure to seal the edges where the two caramels meet.

•
Put the chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl and heat in the microwave on high for 1 minute. Stir the chocolate, and then heat on high for another minute.