A dad’s post on Threads has gone viral after sharing his confusion—and growing amusement—over something his young son said he learned at school.
The post, shared by @phillip.brandon back in late May, has racked up 1.7 million views for its mix of childhood innocence and unexpected classroom confusion.
In the post, the father explained that his son, described as a “very fluent reader,” came home with a surprising linguistic claim.
“Papa, did you know there are no words that end in ‘c’?” the child reportedly told him. The dad admitted he had no idea where the comment came from and tried to gently correct him. He wrote in the post: “I tried to explain that there are many words — common words, words that he uses every day— that end in C.”
But the child was unconvinced. “But my teacher is older than you! She probably knows things that you don’t,” he told his father, according to the Threads post.
Trying to get clarity, the dad later shared that his son eventually told him more about what the teacher had said. “He finally admitted, ‘She says there are some words, but those aren’t normal words they’re just a special kind of word!’” he wrote. “I’m guessing this is an allusion to adjectives? Which I wouldn’t call abnormal, but I’m also not teaching kindergarten.”
In a follow‑up Threads post shared on January 29 of this year, the father said he finally brought up the exchange with the teacher during a casual conversation about miscommunications at school. What he heard next stunned him.
“I brought up the ‘There are no words that end in ‘c’ thing.’ Y’all. This woman looked me in the face and said, ‘There aren’t.’” he wrote in the recent post.
The dad said he paused before responding. “I blinked and said, ‘There are. There are words that end in ‘c’.” According to his post, the teacher then shifted slightly. “She hemmed and hawed and admitted that well, most of the words ending in C are a suffix or a word-forming part… but still. Her first instinct was to double down…,” the Threads user said.
In case you’re wondering, here is a list of common words that end in ‘c’: music, lyric, relic, classic, traffic, fabric, basic, clinic…
The viral post comes amid broader conversations about education quality and teacher training. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey, found “fewer people are completing the educational requirements to be hired as teachers – just one indicator of the field’s growing pipeline problem,” based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The report noted that many K‑12 teachers traditionally enter the field through a bachelor’s degree in education, which includes a teacher preparation program. But increasingly, states also allow teachers to qualify through alternative certification routes offered by universities, nonprofits, government programs, or other organizations. The research center found that these teacher preparation pathways—both traditional and alternative—have experienced a steep decline in enrollment.
Between the 2012‑2013 and 2020‑2021 school years, the number of people completing teacher prep programs fell from about 190,000 to 160,000, according to the survey. From 2020 to 2021, 13 percent of prospective educators went through alternative programs not affiliated with higher‑education institutions.
Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via Threads.
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