12-024

 

How to Yawn

 

Due to societal taboos, the art of yawning has become anathema and nearly extinct.  This embarrassing situation is the result of a plot by a cluster of radical Democrats.   In fact, mainstream Democrats are downright embarrassed at their party’s culpability.  Therefore, as part of the No Child Left Behind reform package announced by the Administration, performance-testing waivers will be issued to schools providing incontrovertible evidence that the overwhelming majority of their students can ably yawn.

 

Freeing educators from the yoke of standards, competencies, and student-proficiency examinations will create an atmosphere for uninhibited use their training, talents, and oratory skills to ensure students can and do yawn.  The era requiring students to suppress yawning is over.

 

To implement this initiative, the federal government is in the process of hiring experts who have perfected the art of stimulating yawning.  Not only will this allow those who have a proven proficiency at eliciting yawns, e.g. former politicians and clergy members, to provide advanced training in yawn provocation, it will also significantly reduce unemployment among a group that has been denied jobs once their aptitude became apparent during interviews.  Discrimination against those who induce yawning is about to become an embarrassing memory.

 

To properly train students in succumbing to the yawn impulse, an atmosphere conducive to eliciting this involuntarily reflex must be created in schools.  Fortunately, the trend to eliminate windows from schools beginning in the 1960s has given institutions an abundance of stale air and blank walls.  Older schools that still have classrooms with windows can close and block panes, using them as bulletin board space until tax revenues are sufficient to structurally eliminate ventilation and exterior views.  Resourceful educators can create barriers to visual access of the outside world, by posting class rules, lunch menus, line leader assignments, and the like on the glass. 

 

Instruction in proper technique is also crucial.  Yawning requires complex coordination and timing.  The yawner must, at a minimum, perform two distinct actions in rapid succession to successfully effectuate even the most rudimentary yawn.  First, the mouth involuntarily and widely opens far enough to elongate the eardrums.  Second, as the oral cavity stretches to the fullest aperture, deep inhalation occurs.  As one becomes more adept, simultaneous air intake can be distributed between the nose and mouth.   

 

True aficionados produce audible inhalations and exhalations.  Gifted yawners can hope to one day master pandiculation.  This feat synchronizes concurrent lengthening and stiffening of the torso while raising the arms above one’s head and yawning.  Attempts to perform pandiculation by the uninitiated should be avoided unless supervised.  Even once proper training and conditioning are complete, caution should be exercised.

 

As gross and fine motor skills are needed to yawn properly, only professional educators should offer yawn training. They, alone, are truly adept and experienced in generating the necessary stress, overwork, boredom, and fatigue.  Any endeavor to provoke yawning by infectious yawn stimulation is dangerous and highly unethical.