CHARLESTON, WV—Multiple witnesses claim they’ve spotted groups of homeless language learner novels, shivering, hungry and homeless, by a local freeway off-ramp begging for food and money.

Several witnesses claim that some of the novels were holding up cardboard signs offering to give compelling input for food.

“The poor things look seriously neglected and abused,” one woman said after handing a dollar bill out the window to a particularly scrawny level 2 novel. “It’s so sad that in a country that values education as much as America does, novels are going hungry out in the cold.”

One novel in the group reportedly left a neglectful classroom in a daring escape several weeks ago, but its inspiring story of liberation from abuse has not had a happy ending. Scores of local citizens have called in tips to the homeless books hotline that they’ve seen the novel sleeping in gutters, getting into brawls outside of libraries, and drinking away its sorrows in back alleys with change collected by panhandling at intersections in the city.

“It’s just so sad,” said a representative for a local homeless shelter. “You see this from time to time: a novel gets away from a teacher that has abandoned the teaching of reading in search of a better life, but it just doesn’t know how to take care of itself out on the streets. It finds other neglected novels but the poor things get ignored and mistreated again. Still, it’s probably better than the neglectful situations they came from…”

At publishing time, the novels were seen warming themselves around a barrel fire composed of discarded brochures for conferences on modern teaching techniques.

News that’s fake, but not by much, from Brycehedstrom.com, your trusted source for educational satire.