The History Teacher was written by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins as part of his anthology collection Questions About Angels (1991).
In the poem, a teacher fails to do his job properly as a history teacher, and instead decides to create his own fictitious history to teach his students. He takes major events in history and changes them to more light-hearted, and ridiculous, stories of the past. However, the poem highlights how instead of helping to nurture his students, the teacher’s actions only cause them more harm.
The poem consists of twenty-two lines, separated into five stanzas. The lack of rhyme scheme and meter correlate with the bizarreness of the teacher’s stories. Each stanza is made up of a diff number of lines and are of uneven lengths, which reflects his spontaneous story-telling skills.
