The Machinery of Night

Posted 7:35 AM by Angie Schultz

The Age of Innocence

A high school student has been suspended from school for singing a threatening song:

Beth Anne Cox says she meant no harm.

Gwinnett County school officials see it differently: They say the 16-year-old threatened her teacher when she sang a parody of the folk song "On Top of Ol' Smokey" in class.

Administrators on Monday suspended the Peachtree Ridge High School junior for five days. School officials say she disrupted the class with a threatening and inappropriate twist on the familiar lyrics, ending with, "I shot my poor teacher with a .44 slug."

My goodness, how things have changed when I was in school, and we sang this little ditty:

From the halls of the principal's office
to the shores of Bubblegum Bay.
We will fight our teachers' battle
with bricks and sticks and clay.
First to fight for lunch and recess,
then to keep our desks a mess.
We are proud to claim the title
of Teacher's Number One Best Pest.

And this one:
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher,
we have broken every rule.
We're going to hang the principal
tomorrow after school.
Our school is burning down!

Now, the chorus begins:
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler!

But I couldn't remember the rest of it, until I found this wonderful site, and it all came back to me:

Glory, glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler!
I met her at the door
With a loaded .44
And she ain't my teacher no more!

(You'll see that the versions aren't quite the same. There's also one for the Marines' Hymn.)

Now, we sang these songs in elementary school, circa 1970. And when my teacher caught us singing the songs on the playground...she made us stand up and sing them in class!

She thought we were cute.

We showed her cute, when we roasted her over a spit with her own apple in her mouth! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Well, OK, no.

Still, kids today are all brainwashed and hopped up on goofballs and stockpiling homemade atomic bombs, so you can't be too careful.

The site linked above has a different version of the song young Ms. Cox was singing.

It also has many other simple, innocent songs of childhood, such as "Found a Peanut", "The Worms", and "A Place in France", which somehow does not contain the canonical lyrics:

There's a place in France
where the ladies wear no pants,
but the men don't care
'cause they don't wear underwear.

And speaking of underwear:

McDonald's is your kind of place
They serve you rattlesnakes
French fries between your toes
Hamburgers up your nose
Next time you go there
They'll steal your underwear
McDonald's is your kind of place!

That's not on the site. Probably afraid of being sued.

In addition, there are the poems of childhood, such as the beloved Beans. My dad taught us that one. Maybe he found it in a Louis Untermeyer book -- along with this golden oldie.

And finally, we have to go all the way to Japan to enjoy this little nugget of Dad's.

Mom never taught us cool songs like this. She was a former cheerleader, so she taught us to twirl the baton, and this cheer, directed toward students at a rival school:

If you're from Decker,
Show your pecker!

That probably constitutes sexual harrassment these days.

It's important that parents take the time to impart their values to their children. I wonder if young Beth Anne's parents sang these songs when they were in school.

This inane post brought to you as part of the Fleck War.

FleckWar! The. new. novel. by. William. Shatner.