Pedagogy
Some claim the moon is made of cheese
—No farting, please, it’s unrefined—
Whose surface is a softened rind
Kept in kind by a cosmic breeze.
This would explain so many things
—No giggling, Miss Goose, stay behind—
That Science still struggles to find:
Is the Sun male, what planet sings
Lead in the music of the spheres?
—No belching, Rob Robin, it’s crude—
Does Mars in Uranus exude
Any influence on your fears?
Is it gravity or static cling
—No more warnings, class, don’t be rude—
That keeps us planted, as if glued
To the ground, each and every thing,
Yet still will let us move about
—Miss Partridge, please be cautious
Your body odor is nauseous—
To dance and jump and sing and shout.
And that was when the laughing cow
—Bundy Bushtit, go step outside—
Discovered with eyes, no doubt wide,
The Moon is Emmental somehow.
Working alone in groups of three,
Compare/contrast “privilege” to Brie.
Substitute for the pronoun “he,”
And forty percent will earn you a “C.”
Jonathan Kinsman’s book length poem, ‘Canso of California,’ won the 2006 James Irvine Award for the “Best Narrative Poem about California.” He was the first Laureate to serve two counties simultaneously from 2012-2020. His commentary and poems appeared recently (Jan 2024) in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He toils in the vineyards of the Lord, aka, 8th grade public school English classes in northern Sacramento Valley.
What a wild piece of semi-surreal satire! A lesson in a classroom of children about the moon, the sun, planets, and gravity by a clearly off-the-wall teacher who dishes out false information, and the lesson is interspersed with her scoldings of bad behavior or disruptive unpleasantries. The poem is very clear about what goes on, and is unafraid to describe indecorous details.
The whole thing is a spoof on the absolute misinformation that is dished out in many modern classrooms, and ends (quite fitly) with four of the most egregious errors of modern pedagogy: 1) having students break up into small groups, 2) propagandizing them about “privilege”, 3) drilling them with idiocies about “their pronouns”, and 4) making sure that all grades fall in a bell curve.