Neil dislikes his P.E. teacher. From his accounts, though, I can’t see anything that should concern me. She seems to have a boot-camp style of teaching, so Neil complains that she doesn’t care about him. I asked him whether she hated just him, or whether she hates everyone equally. He confessed she hates everyone equally; and personally I don’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, I think a lot more children should be disabused of the notion that everyone likes them and everything must be fun.
Anyway, yesterday after school he was complaining about his P.E. teacher, whom we’ve nicknamed Kochamara, after a Psychonauts character, as well as the fact that he didn’t think his Language Arts lesson had been challenging. So I told him, that as soon as we got home, we would each write 5 haikus about Kochamara (officially known as Coach Lisa.) I added a challenge for myself by requiring that I use each one of Neil’s vocabulary of the week words respectively in my haikus.
Neil’s haiku pentet consisted largely of Kochamara crashing and blowing up things. Well, I don’t know the woman, but I suspect she wouldn’t do such things, if largely only for economic reasons. If she blew up the school, she’d lose her job and it might be hard to get a job somewhere else as a result. But anyway, here is one of Neil’s haikus:
Do not do that thing!/No, no, Kochamara, no!/No, don’t do that!! Boom!
Here is my haiku, using the vocabulary word “presume:”
You may not presume/Coach Lisa likes you at all/Run monkeychild run
Of course, we shared our haiku with Peter at dinner. He wanted to join in the fun, so he immediately came up with his haiku, based on a pompous college student’s take-down while trying to outpompousify The King of Pomposity, John Kerry:
Hey don’t tase me bro/Stuffy Kerry droning on/Rent-a-cop: sly smile
Are haikus supposed to be funny? Thanks to all three poets for making me chuckle.