Giving Lessons To Anyone Who Would Listen

Grateful Dead: Crazy Fingers


...6/22/76

If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.

They went from
village to village
delivering short lessons
on many subjects.
They kept apart
from the other travelers
and were quite mysterious
in their ragged robes
and strange square hats.
They used long words,
like corrugated iron.
They lived rough lives,
surviving on what food
they could earn
from giving lessons
to anyone who would listen.
When no one would listen,
they lived on baked hedgehog.
They went to sleep
under the stars,
which the math teachers
would count,
the astronomy teachers
would measure,
and the literature teachers would name.
The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.

--Terry Pratchett
The Wee Free Men