The poem begins with an epigraph:
A poem that raises the question:
Should there be capital punishment in schools?
This announces that what follows will ask (and, potentially, answer) the question of whether schools should turn to physical punishment as a method of discipline.
The poem itself then begins by setting the stage for "the lesson" to follow. A teacher enters a classroom that is already a lost cause: it's "ruled" by disorder and filled with loud, unruly kids whose voices drown out the teacher's own.
"Chaos ruled OK," says the speaker in line 1, likely referring to an old-school graffiti tag (e.g., Roger rules OK!). In personifying disorder itself as a kind of king, the poem establishes just how little control the teacher actually has here; he's a mere subject of this chaotic ruler. And listen to how this line captures the noise of the room with alliteration and consonance of hard /k/ sounds: "Chaos [...] OK [...] classroom." Try saying the line out loud—it's a racket!
The teacher, for his part, walks in "bravely," like a soldier nobly entering the battlefield. The kids, meanwhile, ignore him. They're a bunch of "nooligans," the speaker says—a.k.a. troublemakers (other versions of the poem sometimes use the word "hooligans" or "havocwreakers"). The teacher's voice gets "lost in the din," as though his authority evaporates into thin air.
This stanza sets up the poem's colloquial language and playful rhyme scheme. In each stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyme (an ABCB pattern; here, "in" chimes with "din"), creating a humorous, light-hearted tone. And that's going to be needed, considering what follows is a massacre!
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