Imagine the embarrassment of having to tell students, my dog ate your homework. When I returned to the kitchen, my puppy - with his little, needle-like teeth - had pulled some student papers out of my bag, and chewed them up. She explains.īECKER: I came home from teaching one day, and left my bag on the floor in the kitchen went about my business.

LINDA BECKER: Hi, this is Linda Becker from Williamstown, Massachusetts. Soon out of gas, out of cell phone range and in below-freezing temperatures, the boy's family had used the contents of his backpack to start a fire. The following day, the local newspaper reported that the boy's family was out for a winter's drive high up in the Allegheny Mountains, and had punctured their gas tank on a rock. One day some years ago, he writes, a student came to class with the excuse that his parents had burned his homework. Harry Atwood, a high school English teacher in Dayton, Virginia, says he's heard all sorts of excuses from unprepared students. (LAUGHTER) So it must have been like, what she dreamed of because it was the size of a loaf of bread, and there was nothing left. It was just food coloring and flour and oats, salt. As it turns out, the formula her teacher gave her for Sumerian brick, was more like a recipe for a historically big dog biscuit. And my dog - my Labrador was looking very guilty. I came downstairs in the morning, and it had disappeared. I made it, and I left it on the radiator overnight. MOSS: When I was in sixth grade, we had to make a project for ancient civilization, and it was a Sumerian brick. SIMON: Her beloved Labrador, Dusty, turned out to have a taste for history. JACQUELINE MOSS: My name is Jacqueline Moss, and I'm from Cumberland, Maine. But as many listeners told us, sometimes even ridiculous things can be true. SIMON: That's Forrest Wickman, a writer for Slate Magazine, who researched one of the most palpably ridiculous phrases of all time. And he started taking the fox around and at some point, the fox ate his Psalms. Saint Kieran, who around the fifth century had this fox that he found. Last week, we tried to trace the origins of that legendary excuse 'the dog ate my homework.'įORREST WICKMAN: One of the first examples is this guy.

The dog ate my homework