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.
The title character of the history is completely revealed in the opening stanza. He is presented as a figure of comical arrogance on a supreme level. Consider the hubris of the man before anything else: are these kids never going to have another history teacher? Have they never had another history teacher? Can one man change the future by withholding crucial elements of the truth about history? If so, then we’re in big trouble. Imagine the unholy power that might be wielded if America ever experienced a President who refused to tell the truth about history and instead shaped and molded the facts to fit his desire about the truth that people should know. Shivers just thinking about it, right? The teacher is dangerous, of course, but perhaps for reasons other than it may first seem.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their
glasses
The speaker of the poem knows things that the history teacher does not. Or, more specifically, the speaker see things which the history teacher prefers not to. Again, put the obvious aside from the moment: the fact that not exposing the kids in his class to the horrific truths about degradation of humanity has nothing to stop those kids from pursuing the very degradation of their innocence he is trying to protect. Yes, there is that and that is worth considering. But take a moment to really read this passage and consider what in particular sticks about it. What link is being made by the students here that is particularly troubling and how could that link be affected by the nature of their history class? The bullies from the teacher’s classroom are not just singling out the weak for torment, as bullies invariably do. They are also targeting the smart kids. Either this is a very strange school where all the smart kids happen to be weak or the bullies are breaking with convention: they are picking on smart kids who might be tough because they have made the association that smart equals weak.
he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences
The history teacher is unaware of the extra-curricular activity of the kids in his class. While they are meting out justice to the weak and smart for being weak or smart, he is once again on his way home dreaming up new ways to transform the cruelty of history into a Happy Smile Time Adventure. (On this particular trip home, he has cleverly come up with turning the Boer War into a story about soldiers telling boring stories.) But the key imagery here is not about history, but domesticity. White picket fences have become a metaphor for nostalgic, too-good-to-be-true happily-ever-after domesticity. Houses with white picket fences immediately conjure up black and white scenes from 1950’s sitcoms where the father had the all the answers, the kids were always polite, the wife wore pearls and heels while cooking dinner with a smile and nothing bad ever happened. The kind of world the history teacher wants his students to grow up believing is real or, even dangerous, possible. So the question that must be posed regarding what the history teacher walks past on his way home is: does he really?
