My+teacher+wasn't+half+as+nice+as+yours+seems+to+be

[|My teacher wasn't half as nice.doc]

Introduction
> So let us now praise teachers who today are all so fine > And yours in particular is totally divine. >
 * 1) This is a poem by Roald Dahl. In the poem, there is an older person talking to a younger person about a teacher he once had.
 * 2) The teacher in the poem is named Mr. Unsworth. Can everyone say that? (Right it on the board or have kids touch the word as they practice). He was a history teacher. A history teacher teaches about things that happened a long time ago, in the past, and one thing you have to learn when you study history is about dates when things happened. So you might have to learn that there was a war in 1776, or that an important law was passed in 1921. So in this poem, you will read about how when this older man was a student, he couldn't remember the dates he was supposed to learn.
 * 3) Back when this old man was a student, teachers could hit students or grab them! In this poem the mean teacher, Mr. Unsworth, grabs students' ears and twists them! They were so afraid of him they were "paralyzed with fear." //Paralyzed// means you can't move at all -- it's like you are frozen. So what would you look like if you were paralyzed with fear? Show me how that would look.
 * 4) Read the poem once through and then read again with students echoing.
 * 5) Is this poem fiction or non-fiction? How do you know it is fiction? What happens in the poem that couldn't really happen? Right, it is made up because of course kids' ears can't really fall off like that!
 * 6) The last two lines of the poem say:
 * 1) If you //praise// someone, you say how great they are. So he wants to say how great teachers today are. And divine means amazing or excellent, so he is saying that this kid's teacher is especially amazing.
 * 2) Talk about ways to read the poem -- how would you sound when you read the part about ears falling on the floor!?