Why is a Raven like a writing desk?
Although this riddle is famously unfinished in Alice’s tale, there are two obvious answers. The first is “Because Poe wrote on both“, and I’ll tell you the second in a minute.
Students mix history, writing for new learning experience
Many people will recognize that as the Mad Hatter’s famous line from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
But the Hatter admits to Alice that he hasn’t the slightest idea what makes the two similar.
Well, the riddle may be useless, but perhaps Ashley Tafoya’s fourth-graders can make use of the writing desk.
During a recent field trip, the museum’s education curator, Nathan Doerr, explained to the students why the Hatter was so mad.
It turns out that hatters who made beaver felt hats suffered from mercury poisoning. That caused them to go mad.
Doerr told the students hat makers would collect hair from the beaver pelts and mix it with water and mercury.
“Then they would apply heat. What they didn’t realize is: When they heated the mercury, it made fumes. And they breathed in those fumes,” Doerr said. “Breathing in the fumes poisoned a hat maker’s brain and made him go crazy, or mad.”
This article is about a 4th grade field trip to the history museum in Cheyenne Wyoming. I should have gone too. I never actually made the connection between the mad hatters top hat and beaver pelts. Duh! It’s startling to make sense now.
Those crazy-inducing fumes had their own moral lesson of course. And have provided the secomd answer to the riddle in my way of thinking.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Because you should stop killing beavers.
