| “ | No breathing! | „ |
| ~ The teacher ordering her students not to breathe. |
The unnamed teacher is the main antagonist of Michael Rosen's poem "No Breathing in Class".
She is a teacher who was so strict that she banned her students from breathing during her lessons. Her draconian policies caused most of her students to suffocate to death by holding their breaths, since she would give horrific punishments to anyone she caught breathing.
What Makes Her Pathetic?[]
- She prohibited her students from breathing during her classes, forcing them to hold their breaths for the whole class or they would be reprimanded or punished. Her ban on breathing resulted in the deaths of 43 children after they ended up suffocating to death.
- She felt no remorse for the health of her students, telling them they've had all of playtime to breathe and had no reaction to her students dying in the middle of classes.
- She punished a student whom she caught breathing by sending him to the school prison, where he was chained to a wall for three weeks in a room infested with rats.
- While Michael Rosen's stories are usually comedic, the comedy in this story is focused more on the narrator making light of the situation than the teacher herself, as she takes her own ban seriously and her mistreatment towards her students is given gravitas to the point where they had to adapt ways to secretly breathe just to survive.
What Makes Her a Pinhead?[]
- She banned breathing, a natural bodily function required in order to live, while being aware of the consequences of being unable to breathe as she lets them breathe during playtime and she has no problem breathing as much as she wants.
- While she is a teacher, she spends her time enforcing policies that result in her students dying, even though her job is to educate and support them.
- By causing her students to suffocate during her classes, she would easily be caught due to all of her students' disappearances taking place during her classes.