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joeys-pp · 5 years ago

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This was my first real attempt at a poem, although I didn’t know what it would become at the time. The story behind this one and how I got into poems in the first place is kind of a funny one. I originally wrote this after being frustrated with a school project. The date that my google doc says I wrote this project is January 10th, 2019 which would place me in my junior year in high school. As the message in the poem suggests, I remember being frustrated with the strict guidelines set in place for a project and in my frustration I cranked this poem out in a couple of minutes. In high school, I remember having several options to complete projects whether it be through a power point or a video presentation, or an essay but the one that always appealed to me most was the poem. I feel like if you are ever given the opportunity to write a poem for a project and you want to minimize the amount of time spent on a project just go with the poem. To be able to write four stanzas on a topic in under 15 minutes and to just call it ‘free verse’ was very appealing to me. I remember for this specific project I was very frustrated with the strict guidelines it had for what I could and could not do. I wasn’t familiar with the sentiment but I guess deep inside of me I wanted to be able to complete the project my way- in a better way than the parameters allowed me to do, but since I didn’t want to sacrifice my grade I had to churn out another soulless poem. I guess I was sick of the soulless and pointless written that had followed me throughout my school experience and I wanted to write something with complete freedom that really reflected how I felt. I never wanted to write poems due to the societal portrayal of the edgy high school poet who wasn’t very good at it but still did it just to feel special or come off as deep or whatever. In the moment I wrote this my mind wasn’t really set on the idea of poetry itself it was more conveying my feelings in a new way. The idea of adding rules to writing doesn’t mean that it has to take away from the message that you are trying to express, sometimes it strengthens your message by getting straight to the point. So much of human communication is unspoken or unheard and the thoughts and connotations that are expressed in between the lines and stanzas are just as apparent as the ones that come straight off of the page. The saying little goes a long way is definitely appropriate for poetry and that is what really appealed to me about this peace because in my mind at least it definitely captured the emotions I had towards this subject perfectly and i think that is what drove me to try writing just for fun again and again and again.

Let’s get on to the analysis or explanation of the poem itself. The title; ‘Instruction, instruction!’ is meant to paint the picture of a teacher who is fed up with her class trying to call the class into order but inevitably losing their youthful minds in the process. The way I worded the title is meant to echo the common phrase that teachers use to try and call their class to order; “Class, class!” Something that I have noticed about the school system is that they believe the teaching and retention of a student is the end rather than the means towards their introduction of how this world works. Teachers make the crucial mistake of holding the proper completion of lessons as gospel instead of the progress of the individual student. I think the idea of forcing a kid to learn pointless lessons that are so insignificant in their academic journey is so detrimental to their growth as little humans and this evil in the growth of the student is only amplified when they are put on prescription meth because they have more energy than their already soulless peers. I am not going to get into the argument of letting boys be boys but at the very least don’t pump them full of artificial hormones when they are in the third grade. I don’t think the adults that handle a child’s education or even development (Teachers, Administrative staff, Developmental Psychologists) are competent because I remember as a kid feeling like I had better answers to the problems that my colleagues faced. to sum up this little rabbit trail I think the idiom “ Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.” is pretty appropriate. The first stanza is meant to echo a young me, a student who is confused as to why there is so much structure in the academic system when he wants to explore all of these ideas that are in his mind. He really needs help to explore the relevant topics that are in his mind because he is unsure how to navigate it all or even where to start. Instead of the teacher helping a student in the dark he instead feels that he is propelled deeper into the unknown slowly losing his interest in pursuing anything academic and losing his motivation to even go to school. The next stanza talks about how the approach that the school system takes is a type of ‘One size fits all” system. Instead, the “Path of many options” I feel is a learning system that is much more adapted to the many different types of ways children learn and places an emphasis on personal growth rather than high marks among arbitrary and inconsistent grading criteria. So the second stanza leads directly into the third stanza the second stanza declares something (we don’t know what) and the third stanza sort of clarifies what the second stance was hinting at. What was the second stanza hinting at? Well, “the very soul of essence be.” What is the soul of essence? I guess that is a child's curiosity or the spirit of wanting to learn more about the nature of the things around us- wanting to make it work and finding our place into the society we are thrust in. This is a terrifying concept that we are thrust into this great unknown it strikes every human being straight to their heart of hearts or core whether they realize it or not. The narrator suggests that the best way to go about unlocking the secrets of the universe is to maintain intellectual honesty. So, much of schooling is propaganda, much of it is run on the agenda of the state in order to make perfectly complacent sheep that aren’t capable of fighting the system or the status quo. Why would the system that maintains that status quo give you the tools needed to overthrow it? I think this is why some of the most vacuous or shallow people you could meet have some of the highest gpa’s you’ve seen. In the fourth stanza I show how I wish to be scrutinized by good teachers and in that scrutiny I would actually able to achieve a better understanding of the world around me even though it would take a lot out of me. The fifth stanza is a callback to reality snapping out of the daydream during a teachers lecture if you will, to all the same drivel of a lot of pointless instruction from an inherently corrupted system.

#prose #poetry #school #corruption #school system

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