The Visit

Once, there was a foreign school of some obscurity

Boasting of many accolades with much hypocrisy

For exemplary is their tale of a day as yet untold

Of educational dilemmas shared by students, young and old

Fine ladies, prim and proper, came to rate our school a “three”

How that was occurred to not a soul, especially me

But behind the white façade, the students truly knew

That only what the school so pleased would come into their view

The traffic jams kept us outside while school bells loudly rang

For nearby projects on the road kept the buses barred

How high our flag was raised that day, how sweetly choirs sang

It’s only sad that many punctual records were then marred

How did the school find so much time to cover their disgrace?

Behind the cafeteria were the “tardy” rushed and shooed

While the accreditors yawned into handkerchiefs of lace

The unjustly treated daydreamed of their school being booed

Done with the ceremony, we all filed into our rooms

Where teachers waited to throw their own integrities to their dooms

Soon, faces sunk as our mentor made like quite the arse

At the whims of an administration more than worthy of a farce

“We will do our best for the accreditors”, said a mister

All the wrongness in that sentence should have made his conscience blister

But resigned as I was to my fate, I simply had to applaud

The creative ineffectiveness of his carefully crafted fraud

The ladies kicked back and relaxed and, with shared smiles, observed

His worthless recitation methods with visual aids galore

From the rich content of our subject, we have swerved

Into a mismatched format – then the teacher saw the floor

A dot of paper resting on the shiny plane of marble

Was what his eyes had seen, what we never even knew

Mister strode over to the garbage bin and, with a baritone grumble

Kicked the door open, picked up the bin, and zoom! – out it flew

Missions, visions broken, now he sauntered to the front

And took down the manila paper covered in his blocky font

That day, the penitentiary earned our everlasting ire

For the injustice that followed added fuel to the fire

The accreditors emerged once more from the cushy dorms

Unaware of the administration’s simply sordid norms

And, in a show of prioritization, are showered with trinkets and tripe

While being paraded on stage; we thought the time was truly ripe

The downfall of this prison would have been met with much ado

If only it had come at all, for who could ever guess

This loathsome institution was no longer level two

Despite the fudge, despite the butter that veiled this horrid mess

One thing to take away from this, should one found one’s own school,

Is that the secret to success is forgery and lies

Stakeholders over students is the golden rule, you fool,

Mind not the nonexistent future flashing before kids’ eyes.