First Grader's Answer To Simple Riddle Goes Viral On Internet

When an elementary school teacher Bret Turner asked his first graders an especially tricky riddle on their first day back from winter break, a student’s response was so profound that he shared it on his Twitter account Wednesday, where it went viral soon and garnered thousands of comments.

Teacher and author Bret Turner, 37, of Albany, California, who was teaching 2nd and 1st grades for seven years, posted a picture of the riddle on the whiteboard: “I am the beginning of everything, the end of everywhere. I’m the beginning of eternity, the end of time & space. What am I?”

His accompanying comment on the post said one student's response stunned the class with its intensity.

The first student to guess the answer surprised him and the internet with an answer that was not the one Turner or social media had expected from a first grader, but showed a lot of wisdom all the same: "death."

Turner asked his students if they had any other guesses apart from the first unexpected answer, and they did not disappoint, giving responses such as "NOT everything," "all stuff," "the end," and Turner's favorite, "nothingthing," according to USA Today.

Twitter was extremely impressed at the level of maturity of the answers. Some social media users had great hopes for the student, and hoped his grades would reflect his efforts.

The tweet, which garnered over 280,000 likes, more than 90,000 retweets and over 2,000 comments at the time of publishing this story, sparked a debate on whether "death" was actually the answer to the riddle.

Some users also came to the answer "E"'s rescue, arguing the response "the letter E" was interesting in itself and as wasn't "banal" as the elementary teacher seemed to think.

"This was a very typical first grade moment; guesses to riddles are always great, and often the 'wrong' answers are better than the correct ones," Turner told TODAY.com.

"When the student said 'death,' there was a subdued silence that fell over the room," he added.

Turner said that when he finally revealed that the correct and, as he admitted, more "banal" answer to the riddle was actually "the letter E," his students were "largely unimpressed," he said in his tweet.

Turner explained that this riddle was just an example of the way first graders think. "Young kids talk about death all the time — grandparents, relatives, especially pets," he said. "It's fascinating to them, and also normal. A day in first grade is filled with funny, curious, bizarre, extremely deep, introspective, existential, eyebrow-raising quotes. It's one of the best parts of the job, and rolling with it is a blast," he explained.

In a separate tweet, finally, Turner offered his view on what would happen if he shared the tweet’s popularity with his first grade students.

"I’m considering telling the kids tomorrow that a tweet about them went viral," he later tweeted, "and given their facility with the internets, I expect their response will be, 'Sure, but did it go SUPERviral?' and, 'Just how many retweets are we talking about here?' and, 'Can I go to the bathroom?'"