Unfortunately, unlike with "Batman Smells," I wasn't able to track down a more definitive origin, but I did find more people obsessed with what the song says about the children who sing it.

Joseph Thomas, author of the book Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry, took a very deep look at the chant from a poetical standpoint.

"The teacher's head is a metonym for the mind and the authority that insists that the children sit still and develop theirs, so too is the school that houses that authority," he writes.

Basically the violent song is a result of resentment towards the oh-so-smarts and the do-what-I-says. Thomas himself draws his examples from a previous collection of such tunes by Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf called Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood. That book came out in 1995, and was obviously compiled even earlier, making the Simpsons claim completely void. Even Sherman and Weisskopf don't detail where the song might have originated, though they do mention a Groundhog's Day variation I'd never heard of.

Until another folklorist decides to look into the matter we're forced to assume that the first recorded reference to "Joy to the World, The Teacher's Dead" comes from the early '90s, possibly somewhere in Connecticut where Josepha Sherman lived and worked.

Jef has a new story, a tale of headless strippers and The Rolling Stones, available now in Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds. You can also connect with him on Facebook.

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