“Can you please give Davin a ride to school?” Melody asked me. “I’m so angry that I’m afraid my blood pressure will go up too high if I take him.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“It’s what he didn’t do. He had all weekend to do his homework and he didn’t do it.”
On the way to school I asked Davin, “What was the homework that you didn’t do?”
“I didn’t need to do it,” he said. “For Health and Science all we have to do is stand up in class and tell a fact about the human body. That’s easy. Don’t worry, Grandpa, I got this.”
After leaving him at his class, I lingered on the front steps.
“Davin, you’re late, as usual,” I heard the teacher say. “Why are you late this time?”
“My Grandpa gave me a ride and he drives a lot slower than my Mom,” Davin said.
“Whatever. All right class, we will start with the homework assignment for Health and Science. Maria, you go first. Come stand here beside me and tell the class a new fact that you have learned about the human body.”
Maria said, “When a baby is born it has 350 bones but a lot of these bones grow together. By the time we are full grown we only have 206 bones.”
“Excellent, Maria,” the teacher said. “Charles, you’re next.”
“The average small intestine for a grownup is 18 to 23 feet,” Charles informed the class. “That is as long as a garden hose.”
“That’s wonderful, Charles,” said the teacher. “Juan?”
“The human head has an average of 100,000 hairs,” Juan told the class. “If each hair averaged three inches long and were laid end to end you would have one hair nearly five miles long.”
“Very good, Juan. Davin, let’s hear from you.”
“The human body is full of veins and arteries to carry blood,” Davin said. “If you laid all of them end to end . . . uh . . .”
“What, Davin?” the teacher asked. “What if you laid all the veins and arteries end to end?”
“Uh . . . you would be dead.”
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