NaPoWriMo – Day 3 – a Sea Shanty (about teaching)

This one was really difficult folks. Their prompt: Write a sea shanty. What??? So when I researched it, a sea shanty “is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels.” I took this to mean a work song in general and wrote the following about teaching. Let me know what you think.

Teaching Shanty

Today I will enter my classroom with grace
sharpened pencils, new pen and smile on my face.
I will plan a lesson aimed to teach and to please
I will run all the copies of handouts with ease.
The students will smile when they arrive
to see how I’m going bring this alive.

My dramatic reading of poetry and prose
makes them tingle from their heads to their toes.
They’ll inquire, they’ll question, they’ll expand and connect
I’ll have to ask them to calm down and reflect.
Their ideas, assertions and brilliant asides
cause me to suddenly raise my eyes.

And this, sad but true, is where the story ends
because it is actually my alarm clock that offends.
It wakes me from this beautiful dream
of teaching in this utopia with esteem.
I realize as I hit snooze once more
that teaching in reality is more of a chore.

That is not to say, my dear listener true,
that magical days do not happen, they do.
Those days are what I hold onto when I get out of bed
too early in the morning, dreams still in my head,
every day cannot be perfect, we’ve taught them before
utopias, never work, think 1984.

And if we apply the lessons from books
we would be able to take some closer looks
and we would conclude that the classroom of my dream
is nothing short of a Communist regime.

So I hold my head high as I enter the building
knowing that teaching in reality much more fulfilling.