The History Teacher - Billy Collins

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

              --Billy Collins

Comments

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

I am confused as to what grade these children are supposed to be in, that they have a history teacher who is supposed to discuss the War of the Roses -- but the children still have a "playground."

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

eh, i had a playground until 8th grade.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Did you study the War of the Roses in 8th grade history? I don't think a typical American 8th grader even knows who Richard III was.

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

fair point.

maybe Billy Collins had an unusual elementary school curriculum? :]

[virginia-bell.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear, I was asked to analyse this poem on my literature exam this past May. It amused me, but I still don't fully get the point.

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

haha, so was i. i actually copied this text from my green essay sheet. my essays left much to be desired, but i loved this poem. a little beacon of light in the hell that is AP testing. :]

[what novel did you use for the open-ended essay, if i may be inexcusably nosy?]

[virginia-bell.livejournal.com]

my essays left much to be desired, but i loved this poem.

Haha, exactly.

(I used August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. It was an incoherent mess, more or less.)

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

ah - i read Fences almost immediately before the AP test, but i haven't read The Piano Lesson.

at least you chose a play from the list. despite having read at least eight of the listed works i was fairly determined to write on Hamlet, & that i did. or. tried to do. it took some stretching.

[phobiaofshae.livejournal.com]

Heh, I wrote about The Great Gatsby. I don't know if it was on the list, but I had written about it for a practice exam in class, and for some reason the prompts were similar enough I went for it.

[phobiaofshae.livejournal.com]

The test was really hard. In my AP class we wrote mock essays all the time and did multiple choice, but none of it was anything like what was on there. I was not very happy.

[virginia-bell.livejournal.com]

Heh, agreed. I did absolutely fine on all of the practise essays and mock exams. Then, being unable to make heads or tails of it, I panicked after reading the poetry prompt, did a really incoherent job of the open-ended essay, and -- yeah. There goes my 5. :p

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

What test are you talking about?

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Oh, the AP?

[phobiaofshae.livejournal.com]

AP English Literature and Composition.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

I think it's both about the idea of "childhood innocence" vs the actual brutality of real children. And also about the dumbing down of education by well-meaning but misguided educators.

But, more than that, I think it's just meant to be funny.

[virginia-bell.livejournal.com]

But, more than that, I think it's just meant to be funny.

That's what I thought too. However, I highly doubt that the exam graders would have found it an acceptable response. ;)

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

They probably wouldn't have appreciated "this poem is about teachers like you" either. :P

[altaego.livejournal.com]

I think the humour is just to draw you in. But that the messages is serious--that in failing to educate children about the atrocities of the past we are creating a situtation in which they will be repeated. People like the teacher live in a fantasy world of pleasantness, blind to the cruel realities behind the picket fences.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

"I think the humour is just to draw you in."

Well, it's Collins. He's a bit of a comedian, no?

"in failing to educate children about the atrocities of the past we are creating a situtation in which they will be repeated."

Perhaps. Had his goal been to hammer home the message "those who bully rather than learn their history are doomed to repeat both," why would he have wasted time mentioning the ice age or the stone age? They're just time periods; they have no intrinsic moral weight.

And the War of the Roses was, for the most part, an internecine struggle between the York and Lancaster factions of the Plantagenet family; it was certainly NOT a war of devastation analogous to, say, the Thirty Years War.

"People like the teacher live in a fantasy world of pleasantness, blind to the cruel realities behind the picket fences."

Yes, I agree that that is his point.

[altaego.livejournal.com]

KVS, good analysis. I see from your response to my response that the the tendency I have in other areas of life of making gross generalizations from one small bit of evidence also applies to my reading of poetry.

[goodfoot08.livejournal.com]

And the classic poetry wrestling with the great themes became Billy Collins' poems.

[ex-allenb.livejournal.com]

I love this poem! We had it as supplementary material for our Utopian Lit Class this summer.

[http://users.livejournal.com/stella-bl-/]

Yay, last years AP poem :D
He was already one of my favorites before I took the test and I was so excited to get his poem on the test ^.^

[shadowfax994.livejournal.com]

me&you&everyoneweknow! ♥