Many things we strongly believed while growing up turned out to be far from the truth — and hysterical.

In the interest of finding out facts and beliefs we in the Journalism class came to only recently realize were nonsense, The Willistonian sent out a survey polling the entire campus on basic facts they only just learned. The results, unsurprisingly, were priceless.

An anonymous eighth grader responded to the survey by saying that when she was in third grade, she was “convinced that Barack Obama was a quarterback for the Patriots.”

We all categorize information that we knew — and figured everybody else knew — as common sense, but you may be surprised to find out different people’s interpretations of what falls under such category. Something you might consider as common sense might be someone else’s most recent discovery. This includes misinformation never corrected, funny assumptions never fact-checked, or phrases taken too literally.

As a kid, I thought that everyone saw the world in black and white before the technology for color photography was developed. I was also convinced, from my parents’ repeated warnings, that smoking cigarettes was a criminal activity.

Many, like junior Hayden Hedstrom, who said they she believe someone must be older than you if they are taller, felt she had science on the side of their hilarious assumptions.

An anonymous senior thought that babies “magically appeared when a couple was married for long enough.”

An anonymous junior thought that Chinese and Spanish are the same language, and imagined someone from China would speak Spanish.

One particular senior had some misconceptions about the origins of a famous artist’s name.

Will Chalfant ’23 never drew the connection between Flo Rida’s name and Florida; he thought it was simply about his “flow” in music.

A few had not fully grasped the logic behind technology

Campbell Collins ’23 just recently discovered that work on a Microsoft Word document can in fact be done on an Apple MacBook. Brooke Manfredi ’24 admitted she grew up imagining actual people working inside vending machines.

And did you know that every time you hear a song on the radio, the artist is not actually singing live in the studio? Teagan Duffy ’24 did not know that until she was in 7th grade.