Stick

Oops, 15 minutes left in your class and all you have are some sticks! Quick everyone run and get some sticks...while they are running and gathering, gather your thoughts and get ready to teach a stick lesson!

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Apologies to William Shakespeare - All the world's a stage (from As You Like It 2/7)!

All the world's sticks are but a stage for stickness,

And all the men and women merely players in the global stick game:

They have their exits and their entrances, their sticks and tricks;

And one man in his time plays many stick parts,

His acts being told in seven dreamtime sticks. At first the infant stick,

Green and Mewling and flexible in the arborist's arms.

And then the whining whipper-snap stick, with his satchel of green leaves

And shining morning face, creeping like a sapling stick

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover stuck in the heart like a stick in mud,

Burning with photosynthetic energy like a furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his sweet darling branch's eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and employed to violence by the hands of ignorant pards,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cow's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and grand leaves of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon of green,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

The stick wanders far and wide

His youthful bend, well saved, a world too wide to span

For his shrunk shank; and his big voice in the wind,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes blown by musicians old

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,

The world is but a stage, and I am the stick that turns it.