Could Someone explicate and explain this poem for me?

It is called the History Teacher by Billy Collins



The History Teacher - Billy Collins

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.



And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time.



The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

than an outbreak of questions such as

"How far is it from here to Madrid?"

"What do you call the matador's hat?"



The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.



The children would leave his classroom

for the playground to torment the weak

and the smart,

mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,



while he gathered up his notes and walked home

past flower beds and white picket fences,

wondering if they would believe that soldiers

in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

designed to make the enemy nod off.

Could Someone explicate and explain this poem for me?
he is trying to protect them from the evils of the real world but he doesnt realize they r already f'd up.
Reply:he's protecting the students from the harsh realities of life, even though they need to be exposed. when you hide what's really going on in the world, it allows for the same atrocities to keep occuring. the structure of the poem is pretty free - each stanza speaks of a different time period. notice that the children who go to bully others make up their own time period.
Reply:Have a go yourself, you'll be surprised how good you are and your teacher will be most impressed with you, coz we can tell when a student does it for themselves.



POETRY ANALYSIS.



http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/i...



http://www.poetrymagic.co.uk/critiquing....



http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/



http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/37.html



Poetry Analysis Fact Sheet



http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/analysis...



HOW TO EXPLICATE A POEM



A poetry explication is a relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationships of the words, images, and other small units that make up a poem. Writing an explication is an effective way for a reader to connect a poem's plot and conflicts with its structural features.



http://wwwpp.uwrf.edu/~sl01/explcat.html



http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/...



Poetry Analysis



Teacher: Analysing Poetry is like peeling an onion...

Student: Yeah, It makes you cry



http://www.geocities.com/sir_john_eh/poe...



A Framework for Responding to Poetry



http://www.newi.ac.uk/englishresources/w...



Glossary of Poetry Terms



http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0903237...



http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_term...
Reply:Collins is making a statement about the instruction of history. Using that sole History Teacher as a synecdoche for the history curriculum, he's saying that history is being sanitized and 'dumbed' down. The second to the last stanza of the poem paints the scene of the consequences of mis-teaching history: it repeats itself.



This stanza is also an understatement of the persecution that minorities have endured throughout the years by the majority.
Reply:well... maybe what he meant was how real history shocks when a person know it, and how a bloody history could be told on a nice rosy way, maybe the writer of the poem 1st discovered that what's taught to kids on schools is just a phony picture of history, and how a person when he gets older and start looking for stuff discover how much he have been mistaught, and that teachers and government do that to have much patriot and loyal citizens... well at least thats what i felt he was talking mainly about, i hope i helped...