This week is teacher appreciate week. At the risk of revealing too much about myself, I am a public school teacher in New Jersey. This is important only because the following poem references Genesis which is just an application educators/administrators use to record pretty much everything important that goes on in school. I enjoy teaching but this week we received sleeved bagels and expired cookies from Costco from our administration. Neat. That, among other things, inspired this poem. Anyway, let me know what you think if you decide to read it.
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
The nature of educational nomenclature
Is as principled as my principal, which
Is to say, not at all--I mean, it’s fine to call
Those Fs Ds, there were difficulties!
In fact, the teacher is not a preacher, our
Grades are not gospel, so why be hostile?
Indeed, marking tardiness is just foolhardiness,
Why crusade when they’ll be cross with you?
And Genesis is Jersey’s nemesis--the nebulous
Application that is the administration’s
Obfuscation operation, disappearing
Writeups, clearing tardies, and smearing
The parties that care, tearing apart these
Teachers and those cheering them on from
The bleachers--graduation’s become a
Summation of parental menstruation,
Rather than a demonstration of ability, or
Even stability; the parents’ complaint is the
Taint of merit, and invokes the parrot response:
Congratulations, you passed! All half-assed
Work is worthy, it’s not mercy, it’s for her, see?
A student’s feelings are the only real things,
Marks are a farce, designed to make an arse
Of them--it’s unreasonable to expect the feasible,
The achievable is unreachable, so it’s best to
Make the student unimpeachable--after all,
Our children are the future!
Jogging the Mind 