Academically speaking, teaching’s really spaz

But who expects to make an impression when every

Contact confirms your sense that your life is under a hex.

Don’t give up yet though; for all you know,

Education theorists may one day tumble to the wisdom p.o.v.

For all that that may seem the last thing they’d desire. Utu,

Getting even, eating your enemy’s heart out,

Having in mind how the myth of eternal recurrence really happens,

Is what keeps the thing you see in the mirror

Jolly enough to consider things could be worse, say frontline Iraq:

Keep your mind focused. If this isn’t the life of Riley, it isn’t a trap

Laid by anyone else but yourself; go

Make the Mister Chips noises, or even believe in them; happen

No harm will come from it. Put up with Angst in its full-bottle form—

‘Overwrought, that’s all that’s wrong with them, they’ll all

Pull through’—Thanks, Occupational Health Office, I don’t think:

Question is, what do those blighters do all day but go on a hajj

Round the campus to see who’s alive and who’s dead (‘What’s your alibi,

Sport?’). This Sargasso Sea hosts other crawlies, monsters with

Two driving motives: knowledge they’re hopeless as teachers, and toadying

Up to the setters of targets for others. Stuff them; stiff

Vodkas at six, and they vanish from mind. Then the fun starts here:

What are these documents students have tendered—

Xanax is in it: did I teach so badly that logic

Yearns now for some link with reality? Maybe so: overdub

Zero then, give our best efforts an ‘A’.