The History Teacher

Bear with me...

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 a 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.
by Billy Collins (born 1941)

Maybe I have an odd sense of humor, but I find this poem hysterically funny. It makes me wonder if Billy Collins might have been a history teacher at one time.

I would not have come across this poem if my son had not shown it to me in his English literature book for his college class. He had to write an essay about the poem's imagery and symbolism. I knew I had to write a blog about its latent meaning for parents.

You see, what I glean from the poem is that even though we try to protect our children by glossing over the bad parts of life and hiding behind our picket fences and nice flower beds, they can still fall prey to the darker side of human nature. Despite all our best efforts, they still learn how to beat other kids up, succumb to human impulses, drink or take drugs, and surely often miss the deeper meaning of all the lessons their parents and teachers are trying to impart, at least until they have a little more of their own history behind them.

But, we keep on, and will keep on, trying to protect them from the harsh realities of, among other things, the inevitability of climate change and overzealous religion and nuclear war.

The great thing about history, though, is that, unlike the past, tomorrow is a new day. Its history is as of yet unwritten. There is another opportunity to make our personal histories right; another day to assuage old histories with our children or build new ones. Another day to make our family histories full of humor and laughter, just like The History Teacher.