"The History Teacher" Outline

Thesis: The speaker of Billy Collins' "The History Teacher" warns the reader that it is unrealistic and shortsighted to attempt to protect innocence for too long.

The understatement that the teacher in the poem uses develops from lighthearted and humorous to questionable and dangerous when the topics being understated become more and more serious.

• The first two topics of study in this history class are the Ice Age and the Stone Age, two eras that are not associated with human suffering.  It is therefore acceptable to joke that there periods were simply "the Chilly Age" and "the Gravel Age" respectively (3, 5).
• The subjects soon become more serious, but the teacher continues to understate the scope of the events in question.  The speaker attempts to make the reader feel uncomfortable by referring to the Spanish Inquisition as "an outbreak of questions" because the Inquisition is associated with hatred, murder, and torture, and its historical significance should not be underestimated (7).  Similarly, it is a conventional belief that it is important to educate the public about the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered by "one tiny atom" (12)
• After the second stanza, the reader begins to question the merit of protecting innocence when the history teacher naïvely hides significant historical events from his students.

The irony behind the history teacher's intentions is that his students are much less innocent than he realizes.

• The speaker reveals in the fifth stanza that the students are bullies, habitually "torment[ing] the weak / and the smart" on the playground (14-15). 
• This situation is dramatically ironic because the title character of the poem is unaware that the children have no innocence to protect.
• The teacher only sets them up for failure because, without necessary knowledge of the past, these children may grow up to repeat the mistakes of history.

The selection of detail in the final stanza reveals a final piece of situational irony about the history teacher.

• The speaker describes the "flower beds and white picket fences" of the teacher's neighborhood (19).  The upper middle class, American Dream style scene that the speaker creates gives the impression that perhaps the history teacher is truly the one that is sheltered, rather than his students.
• When, at the end of the poem, the speaker adds one last instance of understatement of an important historical event, the irony of the situation comes full circle.  The history teacher wonders if his students will believe his white lies, and yet he may actually be the one who does not understand the significance of what is happening in the world beyond his white picket fence.