Did I Miss Anything? By Tom Wayman Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying. The tone of Did I Miss Anything? can be defined as sarcastic and mocking. The teacher gives two variants of answers on the question – one serious beginning with “Everything.” and the other one sarcastic beginning with “Nothing.” The serious one are what the teacher really feels about his subject, preparation for it and his reaction on students being truant. The sarcastic answers are the things the students want to hear, when …show more content…
In addition, the poem has a climax. The stanzas are arranged in such a way that help to increase the importance within each line. The poet starts with talking about the lesson as an inconsiderable one and ends the poem with such strong words: “This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered but it was one place. And you weren’t here.” (Wayman, 38) The poem has no rhyme and is written in prose that brings it closer to an ordinary speech. Somehow, the poem can be seen in a form of a dialogue between a teacher and a
In the poem By Watching, Hiram Larew uses signature craft techniques to show the realization that people can regain their conviction in God by conquering the doubt in their mind’s eye.
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
Each line of the poem reads as an incomplete thought, except for lines 1 and 10, which read: “I am choking /.../ I was not well” (Nave). Even though these lines can be considered complete thoughts, they are still choppy and short in content. These two lines introduce us early on to the student’s internal conflict versus the setting that the student is currently in. Besides the fragmented thoughts, the poem as a whole appears as one large stanza and there are not clear breaks where a new stanza begins or ends; or in other words the syntax of the poem is difficult to cipher through. In order to help piece things together, I broke it up into four stanzas for each sentence of the poem. Three out of four of the sentences begin with “I,” while the other begins with “my algebra teacher.” This is important to note because the student, 75% of the time, is thinking about his personal situation rather than the subject of class. The disjointed thoughts throughout the lines of the poem standout in the last couple of lines of the poem. Evan Nave writes: “my thoughts are not / math.” (lines 19-20). These two lines exemplify how our educational system is focused on what a student can bring as a statistic. It exemplifies this because math is a black and white subject, and one can infer that these lines are saying
Poetry is a compact language that expresses complex feelings. To understand the multiple meanings of a poem, readers must examine its words and phrasing from the perspectives of rhythm, sound, images, obvious meaning, and implied meaning. Readers then need to organize responses to the verse into a logical, point-by-point explanation. A good beginning involves asking questions that apply to most poetry.
The poem “Students,” by Tom Wayman and the story, “Crow Lake,” by Mary Lawson presents two teachers who cope with the same difficulties of teaching. Although the teachers are faced with identical circumstances, their resolutions for the problem vary. Wayman, in the poem, and the narrator in the story both fails to make connection with their students, however, Wayman understands his students’ behavior while the narrator refuses to communicate and simply gives up on teaching.
From analyzing the text it’s obvious to the reader that the narrator is dissatisfied with where he’s at in life. The first stanza is an insight into the atmosphere of his high school, and the word choice and imagery play a role in depicting his disgruntled
When Bennett describes the metamorphosis of Rotpeter, she aims to let the reader understand that there is always a way out. Rotpeter won by his efforts, “the gift of an enhanced capacity to identify exists secreted by an enclosure- be it hybridity” . In the case of Axolotl, it would not be very different. When the man is in the mind of the Axolotl, at first he is scared, eventually he understands that he was one of them, or maybe even all of them. “All of us were thinking human like, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium” . This is the idea that he now understood the moral code of these creatures and he had deliberately cultivated sensibility towards the species.
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
“If you would just get up and teach them instead of handing them a packet. There’s kids in here that don’t learn like that. They need to learn face to face. I’m telling you what you need to do. You can’t expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell ‘em.” Texas student, Jeff Bliss, decided to take a stand against the lack of teaching going on in his class (Broderick).
Though most of the poem is not dialogue, from what little speaking there is between the...
There wasn’t anybody in my class who cared about my teacher, Mrs. Parrish or what she was teaching or even about school in general. I thought it was just senioritis but when it came down to our senior projects, it was harder to know what our teacher expected out of us because everyone was talking and in their own little worlds. I finally got tired of not being able to hear Mrs. Parrish and got up to go and talk to her. One of Feynman’s students came up to him and mentioned that students would never ask questions because after class everybody would confront the student and question them with “What are you wasting our time in class for?” (Feynman pg. 71) I feel like I can relate because I found that the other students would judge me for asking a question. I felt this way because when I asked a question, all my classmates turned around and stared at me. As I asked Mrs. Parrish for help, she laid everything out for me and helped me in the ways she saw fit. As I started writing my essay, I wrote down everything she said to do and did it exactly how she said it. I first wrote a rough draft and Mrs. Parrish read over it and made corrections so that I could go back and fix it. When I got my rough draft back to start on my final draft, I barely had anything I needed to correct. I made a 98 on my essay and I think it was one of the highest in my class. I heard that a few of my classmates made low 60’s, 40’s and even zeros on the essay. I knew that they failed because they were not listening and my teacher had stated several times that once she went over it the first time that she won’t going over it again and that if we didn’t care, we would be back in twelfth grade again. I don’t remember what the percentages were but I knew that you had to do good on 3 of the 4 parts of our project to pass. I after senior projects were over, a group of my classmates were in the
of the speaker through out the poem. One Art is a poem about inevitable loss and the incognizant
For any educator that is searching for a poem to arouse the interest of students enlisted in upper level literature classes, the poem “In the Orchard” by Muriel Stuart, written in the early twentieth century, conveys the ageless theme of unrequited love. The poem has all the elements of making students understand how far back the feeling of unrequited love has been around. We can understand these elements better through the rhetorical strategies.
School had just started; it was the fall of my sophomore year. I was excited about having new teachers and being able to boss around those little freshmen since I had finally lost that ridiculous title of “freshy.” Although one class did turn all that excitement right into knots in my stomach, it was English 10. Ugh I hated English, partially because I could never remember all those rules of writing, which I had just thought of as “dumb.” I figured, “Why would I ever need to know all them? Computers will be able to fix all my mistakes for me!” As I would soon find out, boy was I ever wrong. Surprisingly, class was going good; our teacher Mr. Mieckowski seemed to be a little weird and quite boring at times but all in all not too bad I mean who isn’t boring occasionally? He had a shiny head with very little hair and never wore long sleeves to class. He was also quite tall and skinny, so everyone had his or her own conclusion about Mr. Mieckowski’s personal life. A lot of the time this ended up being the topic of conversation for his students, along with his hatred towards icicle lights, white reindeer, and especially technology; the thing I loved most.
It’s been a long debated subject of whether LGBT+ rights were civil rights or not. From being able to be gay and serve in the military, and to simply get the right to get married, it’s still a long road ahead, but the LGBT+ community has fought long and hard for simply rights that straight people already have. Torture, electroshock therapy, basic human rights being ripped away, and the feeling of being safe walking out of the house every day are all things LGBT+ community members have to worry about and have lost.