Science Verse (English)

A bored child sitting in a science classroom hears his teacher mention that "if you listen closely enough, you can hear the poetry of science in everything." From then on, the hapless student is afflicted with "the curse of science verse," transmuting every concept he encounters in class into a limerick or a parody of a poem or song. Lewis Carroll, Frost, Kilmer, and Poe all get the treatment. A class about dinosaurs reverberates through the boy's mind as a variation of "The Raven:" "Once in first grade I was napping/ When I heard a scary yapping..." A lecture on evolution becomes "Glory glory evolution/ Darwin found us a solution." Black holes, planets, atoms, the water cycle, electricity, nutrition, and the Big Bang (by way of a suddenly sneezing Santa Claus) all wind up as "science verses." Imaginative multimedia collages accompany the text. minimize