Poetic Response to the History Teacher

351 Words2 Pages
When I read the poem "The History Teacher" for me I thought that Collins is making a statement about the teaching of history. When I first read, I actually quite enjoyed it. It has a little comedy but it also has a little of sadness. I think he's maybe protecting the students from the cruel and harsh realities of life, even though they need to be exposed. My reaction when I read this was that I felt very sympathetic for some reason. I felt as if the teacher had gone through some harsh times in his childhood and had to grow up fast. So, he's trying to save his student's innocence. But it's ironic because though children are children and they're young, but yet they're not innocent enough to bully other kids. Thought the poem also talks about how children see the world how they want to see it. If they still want to believe the myths, then they will. Also, the idea that adults will always try to protect children's eyes and prevent them from seeing what the world i actually like, that it doesn't have all those fairytales in it, but yet one day they will and have to find out that the world isn't really like that. The speaker in the poem uses verbal irony to explain the bullies in the history class. When the author separates "and the smart" in line 16, he emphasizes that the children in his class are not smart since they are not learning the correct information. it emphasizes the ignorance of the kids. It also uses word choice. For example, when he uses the word innocence in the first art of the poem, the narrator is introducing what the main thing the poem if going to talk about into the reader. They way he changes the name of events in history; from The Ice Age to the Chilly Age, the Stone Agee to the Gravel age and when he said "garden" instead of the War of the Roses. The author also uses figurative language in almost every line of the
Open Document