One of the things we had to make was an elephant. None of us thought the design looked like an elephant because the trunk was too short — we thought it was more like a tapir. Also, the ears didn't stick out. The point of making it was, of course, to introduce us to different woodworking techniques (drilling holes, using a plane, using a chisel, using a surform, sandpapering, ...), not because it made a great ornament. The reason the trunk was so short was because the teacher was fully aware that if it was much longer then half the children would snap it off while trying to work on it.
I was rather proud of my elephant, which looked just like it was supposed to, but its short trunk annoyed me. We had to bring our efforts home even if we didn't think they were very good (you should see my crocodile), so I did. My mother duly kept it. I rescued it from one of her shelves when I was going through her house a couple of weeks ago.
That line at the top of the trunk is where my mother managed to break it off. She broke things regularly, usually while trying to clean them. She had several sets of glassware with an odd number of pieces to them. She had a 12-piece dining set with 11 plates.
When she broke things, she would try to fix them either with sticky tape, Blu Tack or both. If that didn't work, she would ask me to glue it, normally having lost tiny pieces of the object in question to the sticky tape and Blu Tack she had tried on it. Maybe 5% of her small-plate collection was glued together this way (and is now in landfill — I wasn't going to attempt kintsugi on them).
This is why my elephant's trunk has Blu Tack holding it on.
I suppose, having discovered the damage, I could have removed the Blu Tack and glued it on properly, but I chucked it out instead. After 50 years of being annoyed that we weren't even given the option of making one with a long trunk, I wasn't going to fix the one thing about it that I didn't like.
How my mother managed to snap the trunk off in the first place is a mystery that will never be solved.