The poem begins with the speaker stating that she is not going to school. There is an endless number of reasons she supplies her parents to support her decision. These come list-like in the next thirty-one lines. They range from having measles to a cough and a shrunken brain. It’s unclear if the child speaker knows how absurd she sounds. (But the reader should be enjoying her very funny attempts at coercion.) This is a fact that makes the poem all the more amusing. Especially when one gets to the end and it turns out it was Saturday all along.